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.
I’ve been trying out Searx search lately and preferred it over Qwant. From some quick research, I found that Qwant does not track your search history or create personal profiles based on your searches. Seems like good news meaning users can expect a certain level of anonymity while searching online.
However, and this is why I avoid it, it’s worth noting that Qwant does share some data with Microsoft, particularly regarding ads and search results. This includes sharing your IP address and browser details for fraud detection purposes. Personally, sharing IP information with Microsoft isn’t something I’d want in a search engine, as it raises concerns about how much user data is still being shared despite their claims of anonymization.
I wanna try Searx too, I’ll document myself a bit more about it.
Does DuckDuckGo do this as well or is that a better option, privacy-wise?
EDIT: answer is here: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#recommended-providers
If you need to hide IP, you just use a VPN. Duh!
And Qwant is not listed on privacyguides?
SearX is great. I self host the docker container for it and I love all the granularity in setting which engine to use for what type of search. I also use Kagi, but that’s because I support what they’re doing more than anything.