What does that have to do with privacy? I don’t use Brave (I won’t use anything Chromium-based while it has such dangerously high market share), but I think that controversy was exaggerated. All they where doing was adding redundant metadata (already present in the useragent string), IUUC not tied to any identity other than their own (not just an “anonymized” identity, no unique user identifier at all) to get some non-privacy-violating profit. And the phrase “hijacking links” is quite misleading — they didn’t change any actual links on pages, only added affiliate codes to the suggested omnibar completions you could choose to accept.

(Edit:) DDG I would be careful about. I still use it but try not to recommend it without mentioning https://github.com/asciimoo/searx — which I think is worthy of trust, being Free/Libre — because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166.

This line in their post gives away how overblown that stance is. There's simply no way for DDG to be as bad as Google, much less worse than Google.

Still, I know Brave got caught hijacking links but DDG is, among all well-known search engines, the most privacy-friendly without a doubt. Especially coupled with a good browsers and some add-ons. I'm talking specifically about Firefox but I'm sure people here have some more unusual solutions they prefer.

I use FF as default. Brave as secondary.