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.

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.

I use brave search by default.