I use Qwant as my default search engine because I thought it was more respectful of my privacy than Google or Bing and DuckDuckGo is not giving so good results in my country (for localization related searches).
I noticed that the engine was removed from the default engines for URL bar in latest IronFox version. So I searched a bit about why so, and found this issue in their tracker : https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/issues/47.
What to think about this ? The message from ironfox dev seems clear but qwant seems to claim that the shared data are anonymized.
If you care about utmost privacy, you probably want to use Kagi, then generate privacy tokens and move them to a different computer and search from there. It’s pretty much guaranteed privacy. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Kagi is also just the best search engine around at this point, at least that I’ve found. Worth paying for privacy in my opinion.
Not sure if making searches from a registered account is the way to go for people who “care about utmost privacy”
You probably want to use one of the ones that lets you search without registering.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#recommended-providers
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/kagi-search-engine/14172/95