Unfortunately, my experience with qwant does not corroborate this. In spite of promoting themselves as “the search engine that doesn’t know anything about you,” in reality the use locational data derived from your IP to provide tailored search results. This function is not opt-in, and in fact there is apparently no way to opt out.

I don’t think I need to explain why this is deeply problematic in a privacy community, but just in case: Imagine that people in my location tend to have right-wing extremist interests. A search engine could then decide that people in my area are interested in right-wing conspiracies and thus serve me more of this type of result. (This has in fact been the case for me upon first testing a site or app when all it has is my general locational data to serve me algorithmic recommendations, so this is a concrete problem for me.)

On top of this, a search engine that brazenly declares to know nothing about me is in fact using data derived from me to customize results? They have breached my trust from the start.

A search engine should use only search terms, syntax, and data I manually and knowingly provide to produce results. No more than this.

The way I test this is quite simple: Try searching “restaurants in my area.” When I do so, it currently provides a list of restaurants in Helsinki, since that is where I’m currently connecting via VPN. When I disconnect my VPN and try again, it gives results for my home town. Any search engine that does this is not one I opt to use.