Qwant: Discreetly put on the end of March, Xaphir, which aims to break out of the "top 5 global engines in 2020".
Almost twenty years after the birth of Google , in 1998, there are still brave to want to compete with the giant of Silicon Valley. After Qwant, another French search engine, dubbed Qwant , was quietly put online at the end of March. "Google and its alternatives, Baidu, Bing or Yandex use PageRank, which is to go up the most popular pages. The user is locked in a bubble of knowledge that prevents him, for example, from seeing that Arsenal is not just a football club , " says Eric Mathieu, its founding CEO.
Xaphir is the contraction of the letter "x" which refers to the unknown in mathematics and sapphire, the precious stone, but also the name of a book of knowledge which, according to "a very ancient legend", was given to the men by the Lord, says the contractor. This engine of a new kind intends to open to the Internet the doors of the world by offering, for each of its requests, very diverse research results.
"Qwant : A humanist engine"
The user types a keyword and then based on the answers adds or removes in the search box some of the results that appear, be they web pages, images or videos . "We wanted to get out of the search by keywords. Our engine allows to combine "n" documents in "n" dimensions. We will then add the voice, the geographical coordinates, etc. " Says Eric Mathieu, who presents Xaphir as " a humanist engine " , whose goal is " to offer impartiality diversity and universality " .Read also: You visit porn sites? Private browsing could be enabled automatically on Edge
The ambitions are great. Eric Mathieu dreams of hoisting Xaphir in "the top 5 global engines in 2020". How? Thanks to the "virality", this famous word-of-mouth of the Web. And remember that two decades ago, Google had swept installed engines like Altavista. With the difference that, the Web has become democratized, the clothes of Internet users are well anchored and that Xaphir has a long way before him before convincing the general public.
Qwant string of competitors
The bugs remain numerous, the results sometimes disarming, and the number of responses insufficient. "We started to aspire to the European Web just two or three months ago." We learn by walking, "modestly admits the entrepreneur, who made his weapons in music and video games before creating Xaphir.It must be thought that it would take a long time: seven years of research and development were necessary. "I thought it would take three or four years," said one million euros, including various public devices (loans, grants, repayable advances and research tax credit) to fund his project.
In the meantime, search engines have seen a host of competitors emerge. Like mobile applications, social networks like Twitter or Facebook, or artificial intelligence based on questions in natural language, on which Amazon and Google.
Eric Mathieu hopes that the multitude of services will be launched, such as the self-learning capacity of the engine, will make the difference.
We are now dedicating our energy to the development of new Qwant that will promote data privacy of the digital ecosystem.
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