I wasn’t aware of Qwant. It seems to build its own index instead of relying on other providers (great), and has proper backing to be a viable competitor in something so big (the French government seems to endorse it; along with institutional use in EU parliament?).
I just tested it and unfortunately got a 403 however (FORBIDDEN). Though I was behind an endpoint of a very popular VPN for some testing, that sucks regardless.
Actually, before I could post this, I tried the search refresh and it worked somehow.
To test again I switched to another server of the same VPN provider (same selected country) and tried searching. Same error, which didn’t go away after doing the refresh. So they might have some sort of spam prevention measure which eases itself automatically, but I feel like it could definitely be implemented better if that’s the case.
Edit: Yep, if you sit on that 403 page for 5-6 minutes without doing anything and then hit the relaunch your search button, things work as intended afterwards.
