A new search engine called Xaphir has launched in France, with the intention of “shaking up” the existing search engine market. According to Xaphir's CEO, Eric Mathieu, the search engine differs from Google and other competitors by offering the user an interactive and visually-focused results page, from which they can remove any results that are not useful to them. He says that this new approach to search makes Xaphir the “latest generation of search engine”. The site also uses an “unprecedented economic model” for advertisers, which will be based on real-time profiling in order to guarantee user privacy. This focus on privacy is similar to the model of another recently launched French search engine, Qwant, which launched in the country in February 2013. Xaphir aims to become one of the top five search engines in the world by 2020.
