I stopped using DDG because it kept steering me to articles that were rehosted with paywalls by MSN instead of the actual source of the content.

I use Brave mostly, because they at least pretend to be private, and I actually get some decent results.

Unsurprisingly the best results come from Kagi, the paid service, primarily because they let you cater the results to your preferences. You can blacklist certain sites, prefer others, and even search the "small web" for blogs and such from smaller creators, and the Fediverse at large.