I do value my privacy, for instance, I switched from gmail to fastmail even if fastmail has less functionality. But for search there is not a real alternative for me.
For instance,in most cases, your wife will not know what you've searched for, but Google will.
Tor is an example of a technology that does what it seems like you're looking for.
There also may be options in your Google settings to opt out of some of their info collection.
Torbutton tries to address information leakage, but it incurs its own costs (e.g. blocking things like HSTS and sharing the entire connection with whoever runs the tor nodes).
source: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
DDG's big schtick (other than privacy) is to use lots of sources and then heavily filter the results/supplement them with additional sources (wiki, stack overflow, etc).
The founder of DDG has said he specifically wants to avoid writing a general-purpose spidering engine because you can sink millions of dollars into it and still be miles behind the competition.