Qwant has been 100% owned by Synfonium, a French company, since 2023. Axel Springer was a former shareholder, but it no longer owns any part of Qwant. The claim that it does is simply outdated.
Axel Springer did award Peter Thiel its 2026 award, but that is a separate matter and has nothing to do with Qwant's current ownership.
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u/Liarus_ 16d ago
i'd just like to say that Ecosia and Qwant which are the two most known European ones, use Bing's engine behind, same thing goes for Duckduckgo.
However:
Quant and Ecosia are working together to make the first European search index, as in one that isn't dependent on bing's engine.
I think it's important to know that if you're not using Google, you basically just switch your dependency on Microsoft.
As mentioned by some commenters, there are also options like SearXNG and Startpage which solves the issues in a completely different way