The former founder of the French web hosting, cloud computing and telecommunications provider, OVHcloud, recently announced his firm decision to take full control of the Qwant search engine. Octave Klaba’s proposal was born as a result of wanting to create a strong European rival against Google and Bing, with the particularity of defending respect for privacy.
On Tuesday April 11, Klaba announced the beginnings of the conversations with the financial group Caisse des Dépôts (CDC) with the aim of founding Synfonium, whose ultimate goal will be to offer cloud-based digital services and thus position itself as a leader in the sector. In this way, the union between the Polish businessman and the financial institution plans to offer “transparent access to the best European cloud-based collaboration services.”
Synfonium to acquire Qwant
Octave Klaba with his companies OVHcloud and Shadow, a cloud computing service developed by Blade and which was acquired by Klaba in 2021, and the Caisse des Dépôts Group (CDC), a shareholder of Qwant, have joined forces to create Synfonium.
The platform will end provide consumers and businesses with seamless access to the best cloud in Europe. As they have specified, this agreement will enable technology-based collaboration with remote computing, cloud storage, search engine functions, video conferencing and other applications.
The maximum potential of this union will be the presence of Qwant, the French search engine that was created in 2011 and launched in 2013 by the security specialist Éric Leandri, the investor Jean Manuel Rozan and the search engine expert Patrick Constant. . This website, which brings together more than 10 million search requests per day and more than 50 million monthly users from all over the world, now becomes the linchpin of Klabe’s new project.
In this way, Symphony will be owned 75% by the Klaba brothers, Octave and Miroslaw, and 25% by Caisse des Dépôts. In a statement from the Klaba family: “In the future, Synfonium plans to add more services to the platform through a combination of internal developments, additional acquisitions and partnerships with companies that share its vision and values, leveraging the technical merits of the best solutions. of European software and the innovation offered by free software. Communities”.
This is the Qwant search engine
The French search engine Qwant was defined as the first efficient and ethical European search engine, and offers the particularity of guaranteeing the protection of privacy of all its users by not collecting any personal data related to the queries that are made, nor are these used for advertising or other purposes.
In the words of its creators “Qwant offers the best results available for your queries and never tries to guess who you are or what you are doing”. Besides offers neutrality and impartialityallowing its ranking algorithms to be applied everywhere and to all users in the same way, without trying to show or hide websites based on commercial or political interests.
Qwant It has panoramic search that means that when a term or expression is searched for, it offers all the results on a single page. with infinite scroll and no pagination. The displayed results appear on the left side of the interface while the right side is reserved for displaying additional information.
It also has for its enrichment a search engine focused on children, Qwant Junior; a mapping service, Qwant Maps; and a music search engine, Qwant Music.
The news comes to make Synfonium a benchmark in the cloud system and its project is ambitious, in the words of Octave Klaba: “We believe that Europe has a large number of innovative software solutions that would greatly benefit from a platform designed for distribution and optimized interaction. Synfonium is intended to serve as a host and accelerator for these technologies, beginning with Shadow and Qwant.”
