The problem with Search is of course it costs a lot of money to operate; the servers, the spider bots, indexing and so on. How to pay for it?
Advertising sales
Subscription (or pay per query)
Government run search engine (i.e. general taxation)
One way or another you’re never going to get it for free.
Any search engine that gives short shrift to AI taking it over should become popular by leaps and bounds. Like Wikipedia, AI may be a start but should not be considered the end point unless your needs are low.
There’s an experimental search engine, Stract. It’s open source, very customizable, and community focused. I think it’s got some really great ideas, but the quality isn’t quite there yet. Something to keep an eye on, though.
… if it’s all the same crap now, just in different-shaped packages, I like the layout of the current webcrawler.com — one of several old brands now owned by the holding company System1
It’s simple and it has a cute little spider mascot 
As I understand it, DDG is an anonymous front-end for Bing.
I don’t trust any of them completely, but that could be said of every search engine, as they use each others’ data:
From a post on VDigital Services comparing Google and DuckDuckGo:
Through a combination of their own web crawlers and data from hundreds of sources (such as Wikipedia, Bing, and Wolfram Alpha), both platforms help you dig up the results most relevant to your search query.
So yeah, they’re all pilfering each others’ pockets! It does make me wonder how long before DDG is bought up and killed by either MS or Google, though.
There was I book I read once called " what’s your dangerous idea?". It was a collection of short ideas and essays, one of them was what if the puritans and ascetics of the world are on to something and one of the ways out of the social media, tech madness is to heed some of their ideas. I’ll need to dig the book out and re-read it.
my suspicion is that ddg exists primarily to help avoid anti-trust regulations. i don’t think it ( nor probably firefox ) would survive without the funding they get from google and ms.
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