I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
Are you sure? They say that they have their own index. https://about.qwant.com/en/
I’m not sure but I did a experiment in SearxNG enabling Bing, Duckduckgo and Qwant. The 3 returns almost the sme results for several queries. Results from Google are different. I also doubt Qwant has the resources to index the whole Internet.