Main problem with "paid" is that you have to log in for searching = all your searches can be tied to your payment into / identity. That's a big no-no.

Not everyone on the Internet has money to burn.

And they plant trees!

That's my problem with DDG too, unless the query makes sense for the US it outputs mostly garbage. They don't handle localization very well, or at all.

No, it's not just you. DDG hasn't been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it's been excellent. It's what I recommend now.

It's not free, but I'll gladly pay to ensure that I'm the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.

I've been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn't give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.

Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary ("search assist" is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn't query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the "more results" button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.

Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg ("!ne 16gb crucial ram") and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.

Could you please tell me why you dislike it?

I think it outperforms both Mojeek and Qwant, so it's my go to right now. Mojeek has a very small index and Qwant is slower. Haven't tried Brave or Kagi yet.

Problem with all SEO is AI is really good at grabbing hold of the search crawlers and creating articles on questions whether it answers the question or not. I sometimes search by date published so older non ai articls have a chance. Perhaps they could increase the wighting based on age.

I use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ together with the uBlacklist browser extension. It lets you ban domains from your search results across all major search engines and also lets you subscribe to blacklists compiled by others, such as https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist (I see now that this hasn't been updated since last year, but there are most likely others out there.)

I wish it didn't append completely irrelevant "Apple Maps" results for places thousands of miles way, to everything I search for.