99.9% of today's internet is encrypted by default - https.
DDG definitely does. (Though you want to change the settings on the site from GET to POST for privacy)
The current tls standards in Https/3 /quic is especially resilient for standard encrypted web connections.
So, what you do on a site can't be seen by anyone other than you and the site.
What a site collects is what you allow them to have. And trusting (or not) to believe their policies.
If you use encrypted DNS (doh, dot, dnscrypt, etc.) your ISP can't see what you're looking up. If you use encrypted AND oblivious doh, or anonymized dnscrypt, nobody can tell what sites your DNS is looking for and the DNS resolver itself can't tell where the request you make comes from.
Ech/esni is the newest standard for DNS where nobody can even tell what sites you are making a secure connection to. (The IP can be seen, but not the domain).
With that, using a half decent secops and basic isolation of accounts, profiles, use cases, and housekeeping, and a VPN/proxy/tunnel, your internet use / history isn't difficult to manage to keep private.
If I'm coming from a different IP, and a different browser (or the exact same as a million others - tor, mullvad) on a different profile, in a container/isolation/vm, with a different fingerprint, via a different DNS, spoofed device identifiers, and privacy scripts/blockers, etc, the likelihood of my use being tracked and used is exceptionally limited.
A browser for porn A browser for local A browser for social A browser for porn