Qwantify

qwant.com

[Pfui]

Hailing from its Mothership:

194.187.168.24

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantify/2.0n; +https://www.qwant.com/)/*

robots.txt? YES

QWANT SAS, Paris
194.187.168.0 - 194.187.171.255
194.187.168.0/22

[lucy24]

Hm, interesting. I'd got the range down as Poland. Free lookup says the contacts are
:: shuffling papers ::
two names with four z's between the two of 'em, both at the same address in Krakow.

[keyplyr]

from qwant.com:

Qwant is a search engine that respects your privacy and facilitates the discovery and sharing through social approach.

[Pfui]

This morning, Qwant corp went stealth and stopped indicating any UA, ditto stopped asking for robots.txt, and also attempted to get files disallowed in prior successful robots.txt retrievals --

08:49:44 -- 194.187.171.244
08:49:44 -- 194.187.171.25
08:49:46 -- 194.187.171.187

UA: -
robots.txt? NO

[keyplyr]

Do you, or anyone else, post links to your properties via social media? If so, Qwant may just be following those links checking for validity, but not using it's bot to crawl. - just a guess.

[Pfui]

Social media links posted by site devotees pop up every few days: I usually notice new linked-to activity by the sudden influx of swarmers making a beeline for the same file(s).

But these Qwant hits were separate from any swarmers, or any similar activity for that matter. The only fellow travelers were their own IPs, all devoid of UA, even the malformed one in the OP.

From my POV, Qwant's now just another CIDR to constrain to robots.txt. We shall see.

[keyplyr]

Just a FYI - I get almost daily human traffic from Qwant, but very little compared to the big players.

[Pfui]

Hmm. Users from their corporate CIDRs, or regular folks from their SERPs?

[keyplyr]

Humans coming from Qwant search with referrer. I have a good presence in Europe. Qwant is French.

[keyplyr]

Also, Qwant focuses heavily on social media. I make use of social sites & apps to generate incoming traffic which would account for Qwant referrals.

[dstiles]

I've opened up the range to any IP containing the UA Quantify (actually slightly expanded on that). Anything that takes traffic aways from G. :)

I agree that the range's registration is via Poland - even the netname includes PL and it claims to be maintained by Cogent; possibly they gave the best price. Apart from that, the home page says "Servers by Huawei", which is Chinese and semi-officially at war with USA. Let's give it a try! :)

[Pfui]

They've come back again twice, once for each of the last two days, from --

194.187.168.24
194.187.168.26

-- both times bearing the UA in the OP. Have yet to see any linked-in referrals/traffic although they have ample listings for my major site.

Hmm. Since they didn't get my page descriptions directly, does anyone know if they're funneling Google (or someone's) results through their own front end?

[keyplyr]

...they didn't get my page descriptions directly...

Sure about that? Maybe on an earlier crawl?

[Pfui]

By directly, I mean by identifying themselves, flying their true colors. Had they used their official UA, they would've run afoul of no-asterisks-in-UAs filters and such. And they already tried the stealthy no-UA thing two days ago.

So yes, they could've snuck in using a faked 'major' UA, for example. If that's the case, it would only lessen my opinion of them.

But with the volume of pages plus META Descriptions they have, I hope I would've noticed that much crawling and checked out the CIDR. Thus my wondering if they're piggybacking.

On another note --

Their Press section states: "And with QWANT, your searches are anonymous."

If you're seeing referrers, so much for anonymity! When I've tested their SERPs, I've not seen referrers. Thoughts?

[dstiles]

Depends on the referer, I think. If it returns itself as the referer I don't think that gives away too much?

I've just tried it and there is no referer.

HOWEVER! The site does not work without javascript enabled, so I will use it only in very rare circumstances.

But it did list one (at least) of my primary sites, which surprised me. So I agree - whence cameth the information?

[keyplyr]

I've just tried it and there is no referer.

Referrers are browser-side... not that I care enough to go test it. I'm not seeing long-tail search terms/phrases, just the referring page and some parameter data.

[lucy24]

I get almost daily human traffic from Qwant

Well, that's reassuring. I just got a visit from them (where "just" = in my latest log-processing run, spanning a few days) and, since I have no memory, I had to search WebmasterWorld for the name.

For comparison purposes, the visits went:
robots.txt followed by first page
robots.txt followed by four of the, I think, nine pages linked from the front page. Don't know if there was a reason for the selection, but requests did not include anything from the roboted-out /boilerplate/ directory.

This appears to be identical to what pfui* observed, right down to the .24 and .26 IPs.

I wouldn't have guessed that they involve social media or other human referers, since the crawl began on my front page, where nobody ever goes.


* Annie? Really? I always thought of you as more of an Agrippina.

[Pfui]

Still at it. Still stealth with bare IPs and no UAs and no robots.txt:

00:18:53 194.187.171.157
00:18:54 194.187.171.201
00:18:54 194.187.171.230

Still unimpressed.

[topr8]

they've been hitting me this week from:
194.187.168.21
194.187.168.19

and they have identified themselves as:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantify/2.1n; +https://www.qwant.com/)/*

and they have requested robots.txt

i haven't noticed an actual referer from them yet though

[lucy24]

Somewhere along the line I put Qwantify on my ignore list, but prompted by this thread I took assorted looks through raw logs. Here's the interesting version:

194.187.171.33 - - [01/Aug/2015:11:44:18 -0700] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 606 "https://www.qwant.com/?q={plausible-query-here}" "Qwantify/1.0"

It wasn't always the favicon, but always an image file, generally with a qwant.com referer to go with the stripped-down UA and legitimate IP. No immediately adjacent requests that would make the image fetch part of some complete human visit.

wtf? Is this something to do with Qwant's SERPs?

[keyplyr]

wtf? Is this something to do with Qwant's SERPs?

I furnished the link in the 3rd post from the top. Do a search and you'll see that favicons are being used as site markers in the SERP. Is that what you meant?

[lucy24]

Do a search and you'll see that favicons are being used as site markers in the SERP.

Ah, that would explain it. DDG does the same. At least Qwant doesn't bend over backward to get their robot blocked, though. Should we encourage them just because the favicon-fetching, with referer, provides a rare clue which search terms are leading people to our sites? (Or potentially leading. Presumably someone else's site was more attractive, unless each of those visitors sat staring at the SERP for several minutes before trying out my site.)

But, hm, wouldn't it kinda blow the human visitor's privacy if the favicon fetch, with referer, is immediately followed by a real visit with an identifiable IP and UA? I wondered if maybe they fetch the favicon every 24 hours or whatever, so if your site is popular with Qwant there's no particular information leak--but if so, what's the specific query doing in the request?

[Leosghost]

Qwant serps also incorporate images, even when one has not chosen specifically image search, it may well be that they are requesting and pulling non favicon images ( although as keyplayer points out, Qwant use favicons next to their entries in their SERPs if the site has favicons, does improve the look, and people "retain" imagery better than they "retain" words, or names )..Something which is worth looking at, is that the initial page 1 "result" that they return for a non specifically image query, has images across the top..but one does not see ( on hovering the images ) the relevant details about alt text , relevance to search term, and URL of the site that the image comes from, unless on clicks the "more" arrows to the right of the "image strip"..or one goes to page two ( if page two has images at the top )..Not the most intuitive of displays..but they are in beta..

What is "refreshing" is that their SERPs are not dominated by the big players with VC backers who are also backers of Google..

But , of course, until a large mass of users use Qwant ( or any other SE ) it is unlikely to affect anyone's traffic much..as a beta it needs work ( the interface in particular ).. But I think that they are to be encouraged, for their privacy policies ( which as they are EU based are far more likely to be adhered to, they do not track for example, and all cookies are session only, cleared at enclose of browser, unless one registers "preferences" etc with Qwant )..and for their clean ( lack of Google's "friends", or "their friends of friends" dominating results ) ..their results show what one would expect ( apart from the images when one did not ask for them ) for queries..unbiased and logical results..

I wont be shutting the door on them..merely restricting where they can go inside sites..

[keyplyr]

What's *not* refreshing about their SERP is they list my company's FB page higher than my web site!