TL;DR - which privacy-focused search engine do people recommend, preferably one that can also easily be used as a default option in Safari?

I ditched Google in about 2016ish I would guess, and since then have used DDG as my default search engine.

As someone entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, it’s always seemed like a sound choice, as it’s one of the search engines built in to Safari on both iOS and macOS.

After spending a bit more time recently playing around with and updating my Docker containers, I started hosting a Whoogle container, which seemed to work pretty well, but I don’t see many out there talking about it, so not sure how good it actually is. I then tried a SearXNG container, but either had it misconfigured or just wasn’t getting many search results back.

At the moment I’m trying out Startpage, but I know there are potential privacy concerns since they were part-bought in 2019 by a US ad-tech company.

I’m also playing around with different browsers at the moment, flicking between Safari, Firefox and Brave. At which point I stumbled across Brave Search, which seems pretty promising.

So, which search engines do you all recommend?

UPDATE: Probably should’ve done a poll! But latest (if I’ve captured everything correctly) is:

• DuckDuckGo - 10
• Qwant / SearXNG / Kagi / Brave - 4
• Startpage / Ecosia - 2
• Google - 1

As to my other questions around browsers:

• Majority seem to use Firefox
• Some mentions of Brave
• One mention of Arc