I’ve recently learned that DDG does not follow its own guidelines for privacy. I’m curious what search engines people here would recommend. I would prefer a search engine that not only respects my privacy but also doesn’t hide or shadow ban content it doesn’t like. Any recommendations?
The biggest search engine with its own index that cares about your privacy is Mojeek. A lot of “search engines” are actually proxies for other search engines, as Mojeek explains here: https://blog.mojeek.com/2013/10/crawler-based-search-engine.html
This is important, because if the main search provider for these proxies refuses to show results in its index, then every proxy is also affected.
Mojeek was actually the first search engine to have a no-tracking privacy policy, going as far back as 2006: https://www.mojeek.com/about/privacy/