I've stuck with DuckDuckGo for years. It's mostly gotten pretty good if you search in English. Other languages can be iffy.

I can't be bothered to self host a search engine. I just stick to duck duck go and I've tried some whoogle instances but I just prefer ddg at this point.

SearXNG, it was fairly easy to get used to coming from duckduckgo because !! uses the same !bang search as ddg. (honestly !bang searches were the only thing keeping me on ddg)

DuckDuckGO for the bangs, with a custom !bang made for my favorite SearXNG instance; on which most of my 'googling' actually happens.

I am trying Kagi but use ddg quite often too.

DuckDuckGo, I'll switch to SearXNG as soon as it comes to Windows

I just did some tests on DDG (sorry OP, not related to SearXNG). If you use it normally, they put a lot of images from URL like improving.duckduckgo.com/t/we?monitor=you&spying=secretly&id=etc (supposedly for improving DDG by gathering statistical blah blah). Their no-JavaScript version is much less invasive.

Solution(s): 1) uBlock is highly recommended, 2) if possible disable JS, 3) try Tor Browser, which is just an anonymity version of Firefox

Presearch. I don't care for the crypto features. (I already got Monero anyway) but the concept of a decentralized search engine is interesting.

ecosia.org It care about my privacy and It also plant Trees from ad revenue.

uBlock + (MetaGer or Searx or DDG/html[no JS]), via Tor 24/7. Onion available. Individually, hit and miss. In total, good enough for me. While DDG is okay (the default search engine for Tor Browser, Tails), intuitively I don't fully trust it. Its no-JS version is acceptable.

Brave Search and Startpage.

I used to use searx for a couple years but it got too unreliable where it would fail to load results all the time randomly. Tried DDG and consistently ended up having to manually switch to google after the results on DDG just weren't good enough (think troubleshooting linux issues and stuff, DDG would never find the obscure answer in a forum but google would).

Anyways, ofc the goal wasn't to end up back at google so now I've been using startpage for the last few months and it seems to work great with no issues.

Qwant. And occasionally Google and DuckDuckGo

I need Google results, in my experience they are the best. That's why I'm using startpage.com That's the best alternative I have up to today

I'm planing on self hosting a Searx instance. But right now I'm very happy with DuckDuckGo. I find I get less biased results and a lot of the time I prefer it's results to google. And for the odd time I want an image and DDG isn't giving me what I want I use bing, which is probably the best search engine for images from my experience.

I am using https://4get.ca/ It's a metasearch engine, I can search in various search engines anonymously through it.

I currently use searx.org instance of SearXNG which for me works decently, and I can still use the ! searches of DuckDuckGo in it, just adding another !, like !!wikipedia

Sorry, this question was SearXNG specific, so MetaGer was irrelevant. I’ve never self-hosted it, but I’d say Brave. It’s supposed to have its own index (correct me if I’m wrong), so one can expect some diversity.

As for DDG, there shouldn’t be any problems if used via SearXNG. In general, there are a few comments about DDG here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1164105.html and I quote:

Negative:

~1-2 years back they collected data on which search results their users clicked on by default with their own link-forwarder. After some outcry they removed that. Their "privacy browser" allowed third party cookies by Microsoft to track their users because DDG made a deal with them without telling anyone. When it came out Gabriel Weinberg released some BS statements.

Positive:

DDG doesn't even have a Linux browser, but I love their Android browser. The DDG search engine provides results that are quite fine

Brave is surprisingly good