Today, I was trying out the recently released murena search engine powered by qwant’s index. The main promise is privacy and no selling of user data. In addtion, I would assume that the general “de-googled-promise” from e foundation would hold, too.
However, I immediately stumbled over search results linking to ad.doubleclick.net. This is the google ad serving platform.
This is what I tried:
Open murena.qwant.com (I am searching with region settings pointing to Germany)
I first did not see any ads because I use uBlock Origin on Firefox
I took a closer look. Indeed, Qwant loads some ads. Interestingly though, these are not loaded from an external network, but from the Qwant server itself:
So I think that that no real tracking happens as long as you do not click on a link.
A quick look at the linked privacy information of Qwant (Datenschutzrichtlinie - Über Qwant) shows that they indeed cooperate with partners for ads (they explicitly mention Microsoft, but also other partners).
We could of course start a discussion why Murena cooperates with Qwant, which displays adverts with the help of Microsoft or Google, and not with a partner that uses e.g. Mozilla Advertising… And maybe @Manoj can provide some additional information.
I guess that Qwant is a good compromise between privacy and an European company?
My final recommendation is to consider to use uBlock Origin or uBlock Origin Lite to avoid the more obvious tracking on the internet.
That is interesting!
I do not get any ad on my phone in bromite, but I remember the ads in Firefox on my notebook, where I use Qwant since several years. They are marked with “Anzeige” at the end of second line. You can easily skip it.
Bromite also has a built-in adblocker, this may be the reason why you do not see any ads.
(BTW, I would suggest that you upgrade to Cromite, which is an up-to-date fork of Bromite.)
How do folks expect businesses that offer free search to stay in business without a revenue source? We all complain there are few options outside of Google/Bing, then quickly bring out the pitchforks when privacy focused alternatives do the needful to stay in business.
Not allowing these services to bring in ad revenue is short-sighted, if they can’t pay their bills the lights go out. Simple as that.
End result is BigTech monopoly wins again.
Personally I allow a privacy based service to show me ads in results — Not a big deal, I don’t need to click on them, and I am supporting the work they do. All for free to me. And sustainable.
Gotta find that balanced approach to these things… in my humble opinion.
Below is Qwants policy,
Qwant is a free search engine open to anyone. Our main source of revenues comes from ads displayed on Qwant results pages.
Therefore, every ad that Qwant displays fully adheres to the values we defend and our quality standards.
When you use Qwant, no personal information whatsoever is neither captured or transmitted to advertisers.
In details:
No third party cookies
No trackers
No behavioral targeting
I have to admit that I overlooked the “Anzeige” (ad) hint, since I had expected this to be highlighted above. My bad. Not a big deal to skip these matches, I agree.
@JustDucky, I am curious how you financially support, if you don’t click on the ad then?
In addition, it would be still interesting to get more information about murena’s business decision. There are services, like metger which offer ad-free service, if you pay the service by prepaid tokens per query. This seems like the better approach to me. You buy tokens and then you are bulletproof safe (at least for the searching part).
In this regard, I’d like to re-emphasize that the unique promise of murena is de-googeling. If the offered service directly points to google (via the ad-links and thus directly enabling google tracking) this still seems slightly counterproductive or at least somehow unfortunate.
Surly adevrtisers pay to place the add – that would be the primary income source. (Click counting is done to satisfy the ad agency to prove that their ad works.)
Ah ok. My understanding is “no click, no ad delivered = no money”. This is the adwords principle. Is this not correct?
This is the (lazy) AI response:
No, Google AdWords, now known as Google Ads, does not cost money if a user does not click on the ad. Advertisers are charged based on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, meaning they only pay when a user actually clicks on their ad. The ad can be displayed countless times without incurring any cost to the advertiser as long as no one clicks on it.
How would qwant benefit then? If it is expected that at least some users click on the ad in order to generate income, I still question the collaboration then. Alternativerly, if everyone employs pi-holes and ublocks, the business partnership is not sustainable. Could there be better partners or employed search indexes?
This is off topic so I am going to be old school brief again. If you trust the Quant explanation which is that they sell advertising space that, old school does not include commission. If, however, the world moved on so that Quant sell the space based on clicks only, like Google, and is commission only … then you would be right about Quant’s income stream being disappointing from non clickers!
Could there be better partners or employed search indexes?