MevaSearch vs Qwant: Polish and French private search compared

A French and a Polish search engine

Qwant is a French search engine based in Paris. It stresses that it does not sell personal data, does not keep your search history and runs on servers in Europe. Besides the search engine, it offers Qwant Junior for children and apps for Android and iOS.

MevaSearch is a Polish search engine developed by WebOrbiton and created by its owner, Igor Oprządek. It focuses on one thing, search, and is funded only by subscriptions. There are no ads, we do not build user profiles and we do not keep a search history linked to your account.

Where the results come from

Qwant has its own crawlers called Qwantify, but some results come from third party services, including the Microsoft Bing, YouTube and iTunes interfaces. When Qwant has no answer of its own, it uses results from Microsoft. According to its privacy policy, it then sends Microsoft pseudonymised data: the search keywords, browser details, the first three bytes of your IP address, your approximate region or city and a hash of your IP address, and for security purposes it may also pass on your full IP address.

MevaSearch uses Brave. It combines results from the Brave Search API with its own Polish index WebAtlas and Wikipedia, and when you want to see more, it adds results from the independent Mojeek index. For technical, scientific or book related queries, specialist sources appear as well, including Stack Overflow, MDN, OpenAlex, Europe PMC, Zenodo, Open Library, Codeberg and the CIRCL vulnerability database for CVE numbers.

Ads and Microsoft’s role

Qwant is free because it is funded by ads. Without an account, it shows contextual ads chosen only by the words you type, without cookies, and labelled as an advertisement or partnership. Offers in the shopping section come only from merchants working with Microsoft, and Qwant is paid when you click on them. If you create an account and accept cookies, Microsoft Advertising may show you personalised ads, sold through real time bidding and based on advertising profiles.

Qwant says that no commercial agreement affects the order of regular results. MevaSearch has no ads at all, so there are no sponsored sections and no advertising partners to share data with.

Privacy in detail

Qwant does not keep a search history linked to you. For statistics it uses a salted hash of your IP address, with the salt changing at least every three months, and it keeps aggregated data for 25 months, also in Piwik Pro. Microsoft de-identifies the data after 6 months. To detect bots, Qwant shares device data, encrypted search queries and signals such as mouse movements and scrolling with Datadome.

MevaSearch requires an account because it is a paid service, but it does not build a user profile, does not keep a search history linked to your account and does not work with ad networks.

The same query in both search engines

For the query YouTube, both search engines get it right: youtube.com comes first with extra links, videos follow below, and a panel with information from Wikipedia appears on the side.

MevaSearch adds a box under the result for searching YouTube directly, marks video results with an icon and lets you choose how many extra links appear under a result.

AI

Qwant has an AI module that prepares a summary of the answer. According to its privacy policy, the search keywords are then sent to Mistral AI and European Perspective.

At MevaSearch, every AI feature runs on Claude by Anthropic. That covers short summaries above the results, MevaSearch AI chat, which remembers the conversation and cites a source for each piece of information, related searches and photo search. Requests reach Anthropic from our servers without any account details, and under Anthropic’s commercial terms, data sent through its API is not used to train its models. AI answers are included in every plan, from 200 a month on Lite to 3,000 on Pro.

Prices

Qwant is free, and ads cover its costs.

MevaSearch Lite costs 4.99 dollars a month and includes 500 searches and 200 AI answers. Plus costs 14.99 dollars for 1,500 searches, 1,000 AI answers and two extra profiles. Pro costs 24.99 dollars and gives you unlimited searches, 3,000 AI answers and four profiles. The Lite plan comes with a free trial of 3 days, and MevaSearch prices include VAT.

Children and families

Qwant Junior is a separate version of the search engine for younger users. It shows no ads, builds no profiles and needs no account.

With MevaSearch Plus and Pro you can create extra profiles, each with its own login, and Kids Mode locks SafeSearch at the strictest level and blocks access to payment settings. For businesses, there is a separate plan at 89.99 dollars a month with a shared pool of 9,000 searches, 9,000 AI answers, 10 team profiles and VAT invoices issued by the payment provider.

Settings

Qwant’s settings are simple: interface language, region, adult content filter, appearance and opening links in a new tab. On the home page you can turn off news and sponsored content. Your choices are saved in a cookie created only for that purpose. Qwant also has a Chrome extension that sets it as your default search engine and blocks trackers.

MevaSearch goes further. You can change colours, fonts, layout and background, choose which blocks appear in the results, set how many extra links appear under a result and even add your own CSS. In Manage results you can pin trusted domains and block the ones you do not want to see, and in Orbit you can write your own rules for ordering results.

Where Qwant is stronger

Qwant is free and needs no account, has its own crawler, a separate ad free search engine for children, maps based on OpenStreetMap and mobile apps. If you want a large European company behind your search engine, Qwant is one of the best known options.

What makes MevaSearch stand out

MevaSearch gives everyone search without ads from the first query, with no advertising partners and no sponsored sections. On top of that you get AI answers with sources, specialist results for developers and researchers, NetKrypton warnings about scam websites, the option to pin or hide domains, !bang shortcuts, dead link markers and removal of tracking parameters from links. There are also separate tabs for images, videos, news, music and podcasts, family profiles, a plan for businesses and an interface in 19 languages.

Which one should you choose

If you want a free European search engine without an account and you do not mind contextual ads, Qwant is a good choice, and Qwant Junior works well for children. If you would rather pay and see no ads at all, with AI by Anthropic, specialist sources and family profiles, MevaSearch will suit you better.

With the 3 day trial of MevaSearch Lite, you can compare both search engines side by side.