Qwant

French privacy-focused search engine with its own partial index, GDPR-native, and backed by European institutional investors.

By Nathan KesslerUpdated May 8, 2026

Each tool is evaluated against our methodology using public docs, vendor demos, and hands-on testing.

Independent web indexes maintain their own crawl of the web, separate from Google or Bing. This independence is valuable for AI applications that need unbiased search results, want to avoid rate limits on commercial search engines, or need specialized coverage. Several of these indexes are open source, allowing full transparency into how results are ranked.

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Features

—JS Rendering

✓Structured Output

—Open Source

—Self-Hosted Option

Pricing:PaidSee pricing →

Editorial assessment

The European sovereignty play – French-owned, GDPR-native, supported by institutional investors. Has an API though availability varies by market. Relies partially on Bing for results (which is increasingly problematic post-Bing API shutdown). The independent index portion is limited. More of a political project than a technical one.

How Qwant compares

Brave Search API

Brave Search API offers a fully independent index without Bing dependency at proven scale.

Mojeek

Mojeek is also European (UK) with a fully independent index and no Bing fallback.

Stract

Stract is the open-source European alternative building a fully independent index.

See full Qwant alternatives comparison →

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