Iridium Browser is an independent project, not connected to, supported or financed by any search engine. The decision for Qwant as default search engine was made in 2015/03, when we were looking for a European search engine taking care of privacy and delivering good search results presented in a modern interface. At the time, Qwant (see Qwant’s privacy policy) and DuckDuckGo (see DuckDuckGo’s privacy policy) were on our radar, but Qwant simply impressed us more. However, you are free to use any search engine with Iridium Browser.