Well, it's complicated and it really depends on you in the end. I'll try to explain.
DDG has good results in any language and they donate a lot of money to privacy-related initiatives. That's great and very few do this, BUT they also depend massively on bing: if bing censors something, you won't be able too see it in DDG. There have been a couple other controversies but they are pretty minor imo and almost every privacy-oriented company has those.
Brave search is great and has the best independent index among all private search engines, but it's 100% reliable only for English results and people usually either love or hate brave for its involvement in crypto and a couple of other minor controversies (people love to pick hills to die on)
Then there are meta-engines, who give you the best private results across the board (duh, they look for them on every search engine) but they don't really contribute to the scene like ddg (or even brave) does.
So yeah. DDG is not a bad choice by any means but everything has caveat. It's up to you to stay informed about the software you use to make a conscious choice
Can confirm this. I tried with bing. Same result. That was why it wasn't working, because of bing. Thanks! I'll probably to switch to something else now.
Ive used startpage.com for a while, it uses google results but anonymized. My biggest problem with it was that in couldn’t find local webpage in my home language anymore because of course the result weren’t personalized for my county anymore..
In the meantime I recommend Searx, it's an open-source metasearch engine.
Just to be clear Duckduckgo isn't at fault & always uses a VPN it's the least you can do to protect yourself online (If there are financial struggles ProtonVPN is a free & open source reliable alternative.).
I had tried SearX. It was good until I tried searching in my own language... Guess I'll have to use SearX for my English searches and DDG when it fails.
Thank you for the info.