I stopped using Startpage because they regularly limits service access to IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor and it was immensely annoying having to prove that I’m a human each time I searched for anything.
Have you also heard of SearXNG?
I’d be also curious to know what annoyed you about DDG or Brave search.
It does! You can download the additional languages and then configure it how you want (a very common one is to swipe on the space bar)