Qwant Maps Scraper

Qwant Maps Availability Diagnostic

Qwant discontinued its standalone Maps service. The legacy /maps/ route and map.qwant.com resolve to Qwant's ordinary web search, which is not a Maps surface, and the current Qwant client exposes no dedicated public place-results route.

This Actor no longer asserts that as a constant. Each run makes one bounded observation pass over the Qwant-owned Maps routes, records what they actually served (final host and path, HTTP status, redirect chain, page title, and map/place marker counts), and classifies the availability from that evidence. It never retries, never answers a challenge, never substitutes web search for map data, and never falls back to a third-party host. It emits no place-shaped dataset rows.

Routes probed

Label	URL
legacy-maps-path	https://www.qwant.com/maps/
maps-host	https://map.qwant.com/

Both are requested without a query string. Qwant's robots.txt disallows /?*q=* for User-agent: *, so a query-bearing probe would be disallowed; the question this Actor answers is whether a Maps surface exists at all, which does not need one. The same robots.txt is read once per run and each probed path is reported against it (robots.checks[].matchedRule / disallowed) as disclosure, not as a pre-emptive refusal.

Status values

status	reasonCode	Meaning
DISCONTINUED	standalone-maps-discontinued	At least one probed route served a document and none rendered a map container, place card or map canvas.
SURFACE_AVAILABLE	maps-surface-detected	A probed route rendered a map/place marker, so the discontinued assumption no longer holds. The extractor still emits no rows until it is rebuilt.
BLOCKED	routes-refused	Every probed route was observed and every one answered with an error status.
UNVERIFIED	probe-unavailable	No route could be observed (browser launch failure or transport error), so availability could not be confirmed either way. When the probe browser itself failed to start, OUTPUT.browserLaunchError carries the cause.

Exit code is 0 for DISCONTINUED and SURFACE_AVAILABLE (the availability question was answered) and 1 for BLOCKED and UNVERIFIED (it was not).

Input

All input fields are optional. They are copied into the diagnostic for run context only; no search query is sent to Qwant.

Field	Description	Default
query	Optional query context, up to 256 characters. No search is performed.	restaurant paris
locale	Optional locale context, up to 16 characters. No localized search is performed.	en_us
maxItems	Legacy compatibility field, from 1 to 500. It does not control output; no dataset rows are produced.	10

Example:

{
  "query": "cafe paris",
  "locale": "fr_fr",
  "maxItems": 1
}

The accepted input fields and constraints are defined in .actor/input_schema.json.

Output

Each run stores exactly one JSON object at OUTPUT. It reports the observed status, the reason code, the zero record count, and the per-route evidence that produced the verdict. No dataset rows are pushed.

{
  "status": "DISCONTINUED",
  "service": "Qwant Maps",
  "reasonCode": "standalone-maps-discontinued",
  "recordCount": 0,
  "datasetRecordsProduced": false,
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-26T09:12:44.118Z",
  "query": "cafe paris",
  "locale": "fr_fr",
  "requestedMaxItems": 1,
  "routeStatus": "legacy-alias",
  "probeAttempted": true,
  "routesProbed": 2,
  "mapsSurfaceDetected": false,
  "webSearchAliasDetected": true,
  "observedPageTitles": "Qwant - The search engine that doesn't track you. | …",
  "routes": [
    {
      "label": "legacy-maps-path",
      "host": "www.qwant.com",
      "path": "/maps/",
      "finalHost": "www.qwant.com",
      "finalPath": "/",
      "httpStatus": 200,
      "pageTitle": "Qwant - The search engine that doesn't track you.",
      "redirectChain": [],
      "mapContainers": 0,
      "placeCards": 0,
      "mapCanvas": 0,
      "webResultCards": 0,
      "bodyTextLength": 12480,
      "bodyExcerpt": "…",
      "error": null
    }
  ],
  "robots": {
    "url": "https://www.qwant.com/robots.txt",
    "httpStatus": 200,
    "checks": [{ "path": "/maps/", "matchedRule": null, "disallowed": false }]
  },
  "details": "…",
  "message": "Qwant Maps is discontinued. Observed 2 Qwant-owned Maps route(s), none rendered a maps surface. No dataset records were created.",
  "nextStep": "Resume place extraction only if Qwant republishes a public, dedicated Maps surface."
}

Page excerpts are bounded to 240 characters and only host and path are stored, so no query string is persisted.

The exact OUTPUT diagnostic schema is defined in .actor/output_schema.json and .actor/key_value_store_schema.json. This Actor intentionally has no dataset schema because it writes no dataset rows.

Local development

npm install
npm run check   # node --check on every source file
npm test        # node --test test/actor.test.js