I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google's results instead of bing's.

Edit: The ultimate search engine though, as mentioned by macattack, is SearxNG because it combines privacy with every other search engine and even allows you to mix and match your result sources.

My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn't selling me.

I self-host searXNG, but you can use one of the public instances as well. My understanding is that it is more secure because you're search results are commingled with whoever else uses the instance, but you also can use something like libredirect to further distribute your search results across various instances for further security

I use startpage.

Also a bit unrelated, but I just found that Gigablast shut down 10 months ago. And also this (a bit earlier) comment from the author: (source)

Yeah, Google forced my search engine basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he'd been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google's results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu sites, apparently Google wasn't good with that.

I want to take this time to say DDG is getting worse in the hopes they reverse course if I say it enough times.

They are giving location based results even when location is off. They are putting us in the bubble they based their marketing around being outside of

I think mojeek is the best in privacy atm but it isn't really good as a search engine.

It doesn't appear to be down:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=test&ia=web

duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives

MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.

And it was initially founded in 1996!

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer

It currently supports the following languages/regions:

Dansk (Danmark)

Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)

English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)

Español (España/México)

Suomalainen (Suomi)

Français (Canada/France)

Italiano (Italia)

Nederlands (Nederland)

Polski (Polska)

Svenska (Sverige)

Source: https://metager.org/lang

There is a TOR-hidden service too:

https://metager.org/tor

It is open source:

https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer

And other useful features, for example:

That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.

Source: https://metager.org/tips

Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:

https://searx.space/

searxng is my first, ddg second

I've used DDG for years but I'm worried that Microsoft has some power with them. Also that its headquarters is in the US, where there are hardly any laws that protect the user. I used Qwant for a season, based in France, but he asked me to remove the browser's ad blocker. Since then, I use a SearXNG instance, waiting to mount my own. Very happy.

Duck duck go is my 2nd lol. SearX is my first.

Qwant.com ?

No one really talks about it and it's in its infancy, but I've really been enjoying Stract.com

This is what I use because they take your ad revenue and plant trees. Judge for yourself.

https://www.ecosia.org/privacy

SearXNG or Stract.

I used to use DDG until they started censoring results.

I use Brave Search and Startpage. The latter is basically just a private Google proxy with some cool features and the former is fully independent, private, aesthetically appealing and has nice optional AI features.

Haven't seen Metager and Mojeek mentioned. Not quite sure what the consensus of them are in the privacy community.

Personally I'd like to see Stract succeed.

My own searx-ng instance (routed via VPN), followed by Startpage

DDG has a weird relationship with Microsoft, I wouldn't use it. I currently pay the Pro plan for Kagi and I'm very satisfied with it.