I use Qwant as my default search engine because I thought it was more respectful of my privacy than Google or Bing and DuckDuckGo is not giving so good results in my country (for localization related searches).
I noticed that the engine was removed from the default engines for URL bar in latest IronFox version. So I searched a bit about why so, and found this issue in their tracker : https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/issues/47.
What to think about this ? The message from ironfox dev seems clear but qwant seems to claim that the shared data are anonymized.
They sell ads and they work with MS (Bing). But they’re EU (French) and I hope more respectful of our privacy because of GDPR.
It’s my fallback engine but my main search engine is Kagi, even though it’s US and paid-for (no-free tier, beside free trial).
I know saying good things about a paid product is frowned upon around here but I certainly won’t lie, or change what I think in order to please some random self-proclaimed vigilante. Imho, Kagi works very well and, as long as you can afford it, is worth every single cent.
It’s ad-free, tracking and seo-crap free too. Comes with some nifty features (to further filter and control the type of results you see, for example). I also love their ‘small web’ search that focuses, well, on small websites by default. That’s so cool. Plus, it gives excellent results that must be among the most useful I’ve ever gotten… like in the 90s and 00s when Google used to be disruptive and useful to its users, not to advertisers ;)