you know that friend who always spits out tonnes of plausible bullshit? Well now they’ve got a 1-800 number

I think that’s very unlikely; this PR was delivered pretty much word-for-word with a different partner earlier this year: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox-partners-with-qwant/

imo this is just your standard PR announcement of a partnership between two known entities which will get people talking before they forget about it