DeGoogle Yourself

Both have greatly disappointed me by not even trying when I apply quotes to more than two words. Can't say I've done a deep dive comparing their privacy but I try to spread things out among search engines.

Just my experience, but DDG results are still consistently worse for me. When I do try DDG and Mojeek first, there is about a 1 in 6 chance I will need to fall back to Brave or Startpage to find what I'm after.

You are doing it wrong I am just looking up which engines I use: mwmb1, a small little guy. Mojeek, not entirely sure what it is about. Yacy, I guess it is a image engine. Bing, only because I need a big engine and the other big players do not play well with my setup. Then all these search engines are wrapped into a little bundle called searxng. There are no silly ads based on your search, there is considerably less tracking (set up pihole to get next to no tracking) as it is harder for engines to see your stuff.

What is actually logged? Your choice, but it is not like anyone other than yourself if going to see it. Result quality? Your choice again you get to choose which engines you use, the ones I use do not throw errors to me but I also only have static IP addresses (VNC and LAN) as I understand it the big tech players do not like static IP addresses sniffing their results.

Trust? I do not trust the internet one bit so I lower my attack surfaces and fell down the hole of home labbing. It started with setting up a pihole, than a secondary one, than it moved to CUPS and much later scanjs (or something like that) because I learnt about how big printer makes money off of people now it is not just ink. Than when I moved my domain the first time I got a package with unlimited emails so I could give out a different email address to everything (extended free trials/kill emails that get spammy or leaked). Than it was Home Assistant, to replace homebridge for my Apple Homekit stuff Home Assistant is just so much better and can do so much more. Than I setup vaultwarden, to self host my Bitwarden stuff. I could go on and on about the things I self host like immich and caddy but I will stop there. Half my place flooded so I was away from home considerably more than normal and did not have access to searxng or pihole the ads burnt my eyes again! So I got a couple static IP addresses from my ISP, I was going to self host my email because HostHero charges an arm and a leg for unlimited emails (I had 200+ at the time so the less expensive option was not a choice as it only gave me 100 email addresses or something like that) so that is why I have 2 and they are the free with my ISP (you do not need them for searxng). I found out how stupid hard it would be for me to host my own email and decided to go with my new webhost easyDNS who offers a wild card option for email, they also have my 3rd static IP for my VNC that hosts my blog. It was either 2 static IPs or no static IPs from my ISP because I did not want to have port 25 open to my whole LAN! Why do I tell you this? With the static IP addresses I needed to get a firewall, I got something that I could install openWRT on and than use wireguard to VPN into my LAN for seccurity, ad/tracker blocking, searxng, and all my other things.

Brave has shitty leadership and pushes crypto and AI, ddg is owned by a former ad company CEO.. both are not great but im currently using ddg because at the very least has a no AI image filter... I too am looking for a better option so any suggestions appreciated. Self-hosted is currently not an option for me.

(Usually when I mention anywhere that I'm using either of those two, the comments just blow up how awful they are and that I'm supporting whatever bad stuff by using them... But they never suggest an alternative)

I've found brave to simply not be good enough to use as a main search engine. Depends on your needs of course.
Iirc it didn't even respect quotes.