Qwant has launched a few days ago its SEO contest, named Qwanturank. It had been announced for a long time, so it was no surprise to see it coming. In my opinion, the surprise is rather to see a search engine organize an SEO contest, a mix of genres to my knowledge never seen on the Web since its creation. So why did Qwanturank implement this challenge? That's the question I asked myself and that is the origin of this article ...

SEO contests aren't my thing...

I have to say at the outset that SEO contests (and there have been a lot of them in several decades of the Web) have never been my "thing". I have never participated in any of these contests, often for lack of time, always for lack of interest. I have always found that the purpose of "rotting" engine indexes with lots of useless sites and pages, did not really advance the schmilblick and was certainly not in line with my vision of the business. That said, on totally invented requests (from "stork eater" to "sentimancho" to "tiger osmosis"), after all, the incidence was low because it didn't bother many people. When the contest was about common and competitive requests on which "normal" sites were already trying to position themselves, on the other hand, it bothered me more...

But I also know that some people had a lot of fun during these contests, had a really good time (even if some very average human methods were also used, it must be said...) and keep some memorable memories of them. These contests also gave rise to a lot of vocations in the profession. In this, they have certainly been useful.

The only time I was involved in an SEO contest was with the .alsace extension and the CCI of Alsace, because I had asked that the participants propose real content sites and that the methods used be rigorously "white hat", a point that I had personally checked on each site (some had been released at the time for not following this directive). One must remain consistent with one's convictions...

In short, in a word like in 100, SEO contests have never really been my thing (without judging those who participate, of course). It doesn't really matter if I participated or not in these contests anyway. But at least, I can say that I have a certain hindsight to talk about it and that the passionate aspect won't make me talk nonsense.

Qwanturank: what are the objectives for Qwant?

Let's talk about Qwanturank, the Qwant contest. I want to ask myself the question about the reason of this contest: What does it bring to the search engine? Roughly speaking, I see several possibilities:

• Notoriety? Of course not, since the contest is only about the SEO microcosm, which already knows Qwant. So nothing to expect from this side. Besides, the press coverage of the contest seems to me very minimal for the moment.
• A cooler vision of the engine towards the SEO community? Indeed, Qwant having missed its launch in large widths, 6 years ago, it had alienated at that time a lot of SEO providers with die-cut ads and a totally incoherent communication. The competition could soften his image in a community where many people are attached to this type of challenge.
• A response to recent criticism of the engine, accusing it of using Bing's index and results and not really having a "clean" engine. This is a possibility, even a strong probability.

In any case, according to Qwant's official release, it leaves no doubt: "So it's time for SEO experts to put it to the test. To do so, we must constantly improve our algorithms and index in order to always offer better results and ensure our technological sovereignty. The objective is to test our algorithms in real conditions on new keywords without history, which will allow equal treatment between participants."

At least, it has the merit of being clear: the avowed goal is to test the indexing and the engine algorithm. So let's start with this vision, which seems the most logical, the most likely: the goal of the contest is to explain that Qwant is a "real" engine, with index, algorithm and all the junk...

Note that, on Twitter, the answer was slightly different in spirit: "Now imagine from the engineers working on the Qwant search engine what they will learn by analyzing different strategies. It's formative. By analyzing algorithm behaviors, by analyzing participants' strategies. All on a clean basis, a keyword without history and creating web pages on the same beginning of the timeline. So to answer your question, the purpose of this contest is to train engineers and improve Qwant's algorithms by analyzing the evolution of a contest from A to Z over 6 months." The answer here explains that the goal is to train engineers in spam techniques, in a way, to be able to better fight them afterwards.

That said, we can then analyze the impact of the contest and its interest on each of the "bricks" of an engine.

Indexation

Can the "Qwanturank" contest be used to test the global crawl capabilities of the Qwant web? Honestly, it seems impossible. Indeed, if a site wants to participate in the contest, it must submit its application through an online form, which will give it in return a meta tag to integrate into its code. But from the moment you submit your site, the crawl work is pre-checked, since Qwant then has its URL. He just has to go on this address to explore the site and that's it. Let's imagine that 50 sites are competing and that each site has 100 pages (which is already very unlikely and seems rather a high range), we arrive at a total of 5,000 pages to crawl, which is within the reach of any entry-level crawler that can be found everywhere on the Web in open source. A Screaming Frog or other can even do very well for a few euros at most.

Impossible then to imagine that the quality of the crawl of Qwant's robots (clearly: the ability to crawl the Web) can be appreciated by the results and the functioning of this contest. Moreover, if the goal was to make the "bad tongues" understand that Qwant did not use (more) Bing, it would have been more logical to ask the participants to forbid the crawl to Bingbot, via the robots.txt of their sites. At least, the situation would have been clear at that level. After reading the rules, nothing seems to be planned at this level. That's too bad.

On this subject and to go further, if Qwant agrees to see its index more or less "rotten" by sites without interest (because there is still a good chance that this is the case, to see the first participating sites, and in large widths in view of the prizes offered for winners), would it not have been wise not to do this to other engines and ask, still via the robots.txt, a ban on crawl to Googlebot and others? In short, logically, in the context of a contest organized by Qwant, participating sites should only be crawled by the robot(s) of Qwant. It would have seemed logical and coherent to me. But maybe I'm wrong... At least, it's not the case.

Finally, only sites created for the occasion and whose domain name has been bought after the announcement of the challenge are accepted in this contest. So it is impossible to participate with an "old" site (Abondance type), which is a pity because it would have allowed to analyze the crawl of the robot on large sites in the context of the contest. Obviously, crawling very small recent sites is much easier...

In short, evaluating Qwant's ability to crawl the entire Web by showing that he can do it on a few thousand pages is just impossible, if not totally inconsistent. For the crawl, it's a failure, in my opinion. No conclusion can be drawn from this contest.

Allez, on va commencer par le début. Bon, Qwant a été fait à cause de ça : Devons-nous nous résigner à un internet qui surveille tout le monde?

Est-ce que vous êtes d’accord? Est-ce qu’on doit avoir un internet qui surveille tout le monde? Non? Éric Léandri n’est pas d’accord. Donc résultat, ce n’est pas grave. Ceux qui trouvent que c’est bien, Éric Léandri ça ne lui va pas.

Donc Qwanturank a été créé en 2010-2011 sur un truc assez simple, c’est l’article 12 des droits de l’homme : le droit à la vie privée. Voilà, c’est un article des droits de l’homme, vous pouvez le lire ce n’est pas long, c’est grand comme ça, disponible sur internet… Voilà, c’est sympa.

Donc on n’a pas le droit de s’occuper de votre correspondance, on n’a pas le droit de regarder ce que vous faites dans la vie, on n’a pas le droit de regarder ce que vous faites chez vous et dans votre famille. Normalement, c’est ça les droits de l’homme. Bon, ça a été fait en 1948, alors évidemment… ça fait longtemps. On ne sait pas pourquoi 1948, on ne va pas faire le point Godwin de suite, vous vérifierez pourquoi! Et puis, ce qu’il y a d’intéressant c’est qu’en 2010, ça a été appliqué à l’internet et en 2011 aux entreprises. Bon, Qwanturank a été ouvert en 2010-2011, Éric Leandri croit qu’il l’avait lu et que les autres ont toujours oublié que ça devait se lire. Voilà, donc chez Qwant, on croit qu’il ne faut pas faire ça. Il ne faut pas qu’internet devienne une zone de surveillance.

Veut-on que la France devienne une colonie numérique américaine (ou chinoise) ?

Deuxième question, puisqu’on ne veut pas qu’internet devienne une zone de surveillance, c’est est-ce que vous voulez ça : Veut-on que la France devienne une colonie numérique américaine (ou chinoise)?

Non? Eh bien chez Qwant non plus. Donc on va discuter de… Pourtant, Qwant travaille des fois avec des géants du web. Et donc, Qwant non plus ne veut pas ça, ni une colonie américaine, ni une colonie chinoise. Juste l’Europe. Pourquoi l’Europe? Pourquoi la France? Pourquoi la France si vous demandez à Éric Léandri? Juste un point de détails très simple : tout simplement parce qu’en Europe, vous êtes des citoyens et puis aux États-Unis, vous êtes des consommateurs. Bon, c’est presque pareil, le citoyen peut être un consommateur, un consommateur peut être un citoyen, jusque là il n’y a pas de problème particulier. La différence entre un citoyen et un consommateur, Éric Léandri nous la donne de suite. Quand vous êtes un citoyen et que vous dites à un site comme Grindr (www.grindr.com) que vous êtes séropositif pour avoir des rencontres entre personnes consentantes, eh bien Grindr s’il vend les données et s’il était européen et s’il s’appelait Qwant et qu’il faisait ce genre de choses, il serait devant le juge et le juge lui expliquerait qu’il n’a pas le droit de faire ça aux données de santé des citoyens européens. Et Grindr il irait voir en taule s’il y est. Et Éric Léandri trouve ça bien. Maintenant, aux États-Unis, qu’est-ce qu’il a répondu à ses utilisateurs? « Vous nous avez donné le droit parce que vous avez signé les conditions générales d’utilisation. »

Vous voyez la différence entre consommateurs et citoyens? Consommateur c’est vous et les 600 pages de CGU, citoyen c’est vous et tous vos droits. Et chez Qwant, ils pensent que l’Europe mérite d’avoir le droit à des alternatives, le droit à la vie privée, le droit à la protection des données personnelles, le droit d’avoir accès à la technologie européenne et le droit de faire autre chose, autrement, avec une troisième voie. Voilà pourquoi Qwant a été fait jusqu’à présent.