Ecosia and Qwant have just started collaborating on EUSP (European Search Perspective)[1]

This could easily yield very interesting (i.e. "not just another bing proxy") results once it starts gaining traction.

I use DuckDuckGo at the moment, only because Startpage started making themselves impossible to use when they started aggressively blocking access via VPNs. As other people have already said,see `noai.duckduckgo.com` and `lite.duckduckgo.com` which might address your specific concerns.

If you are a Mullvad user, there is also Mullvad Leta[2], which has been security audited[3].

I might shift more towards Ecosia/Qwant.

[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp-germany-rollout/ [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-searc... [3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/16/security-audit-of-our-...