They were historically completely dependent on Bing (like most other search engines) and while they continued putting some efforts in building their own index, they're nowhere close to it.

They also recently made a few moves to push advertising and to compromise with privacy (eg. the option to create tracked account to access some AI services).

On the other hands they will probably be more respectful than Google, and the quality of Google's results seems to be degrading faster than Qwant is improving 🤷

I'd guess Ecosia is in a similar situation. I've personally been using Kagi for a while but recent events make me consider moving to a European alternative too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

iirc Ecosia and Qwant were working on a search engine to substitute Google, or at least give it competition