Your tech choices matter more than ever. That’s why at Firefox, we believe in empowering users to make informed decisions that align with their values. I
Reading through the current Qwant privacy policy certainly doesn't alleviate any privacy concerns either....
Mozilla keeps building/buying, then abandoning things. I'm not sure if they're cut out for that project, and in my experience a SearX instance's effectiveness is mostly based on whether there are enough users for the data to be obfuscated, but so few that it doesn't get rate limited...
Yes, except in the case where Google is rate limited. There is/was a Searx instance that regularly got blocked by Google, I do not remember which one though.
What I linked to is a listing of public Searx instances. You can look at the list and see things like uptime, where they are hosted, etc.
For performance I find it much better than DDG. In the settings page you can choose which search engines you wish to use, for example Brave, Stract, and Qwant. You can also tailor results by adding things like Lemmy, F-Droid, and Anna's Archive.
DDG is inherently bad because it's hosted in the USA and has to comply with those laws and gag orders. Nothing I've heard about Qwant makes it seem like a worse option.