It is not surprising that people love an underdog story and this time, it’s Google, Goliath versus Qwant, David.
Qwant is a search engine founded in France in 2013 and it has 21 million active users across 30 countries monthly. Its number of monthly users has grown an extraordinary 70% over the past year. The momentum of Qwant does not stop there, it is also launching a mobile app in addition to integrating with Firefox.
The biggest competitive advantage of Qwant is protecting users’ privacy compared to other popular search engines out there such as Google or Bing. Qwant does not track where have you been, collect any browsing data or any other data monitoring.
Another unique advantage of Qwant is it has over 30 different search categories. It also sets itself apart from Google by educating their artificial intelligence without having to gather data from users. However, just like Google, it earns its profit from pay per click.
In order to compete with Google, Qwant is not there yet. Here are some things that they should do to increase their presence and reach. First, Qwant only has 12% of its users searching on their mobile phones. They need to increase their reach to other browsers instead of just Firefox.