Most search engines make money with ads, including DDG. Plus, DDG has in the past explicitly whitelisted trackers from MS so I wouldn't trust them. They are definitely better than Google though (as low of a bar that is).
SearXNG (https://searx.space/) seems to be the best option from a privacy standpoint I found so far.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.
My exact choices. I want to love the open source phone options but... Corporations have embraced android and iPhone. I worry about road blocks with things like duo and apps that don't permit install on rooted things etc.
[1] I prefer FreeTube on computers where I have it installed, but one of my family's jank 10-year-old work PCs can't handle it, so I'll typically watch videos in Invidious in LibreWolf on that computer.
[2] I can't recommend Debian for absolutely everyone since it prioritizes stability and predictability over new features and ease of use, but it's great for most of my use cases. I typically recommend Linux Mint for complete beginners.
[3] It handles extremely large music libraries (>100 GB of .mp3 files) without constantly taking forever to reload when I add a single new album.
[4] Firefox is pretty good and FOSS, but LibreWolf comes with better defaults and I'm a lazy fucker.