Ceci n’est pas une rock

Fun fact: Victorinox has been operating since 1884 and has never had to lay off an employee.

To avoid this they set aside profits during boom periods to supplement recessionary periods

What a novel idea.

https://labor411.org/411-blog/this-company-has-never-laid-off-an-employee-100-of-which-have-been-with-the-company-for-over-40-years/

Huh, I was under the impression that they used their own index. I just did a quick search found a blog post they publisted back in 2023. Here are some relevant excerpts:

At the time of publication, Qwant has in its servers 20 billion indexed web pages

Qwant uses Bing to supplement search results on which we do not have sufficient relevance, and on images where storage capacities are very important. On the rest, the main SEO logics are often the same which explains why you often find the same search results, ranked slightly differently according to the weight given to one or the other.

Of course, that’s the company pushing their own preferred narrative, so take it with a grain of salt. But assuming it’s not an outright lie, then they’re definitely more independent than a lot of other search engines.