I use an app called TrackerControl on my Android phone, and it caught several trackers on DDG, so I stopped using it. Do I know for certain that the app is absolutely accurate? Nope, but it's a good FOSS that I have been using for a long time and developed a trust relationship with, so I'll avoid what it warns me about. App is available on F-droid if anyone wants to try it.

I use DDG every day as my default search engine across desktop & mobile. It’s good but the search isn’t as always as helpful as Google. If you need to you can just add !g to the search terms and get redirected to Google.

I've been using DDG for the last year and pretty happy with it

Hell yeah. I consider myself privacy paranoid and have been using DuckDuckGo for 5 years without any problems so far. It is pretty strict about its privacy policy.

What's wrong with startpage.com?

NO.

1. it is US-based
2. the CEO is the former founder of the “Names Database”

for the love of god, use anything but DDG. Qwant is EU-based and has decent results, SearX is another one which lets you choose between instances (or host your own).

please stop taking US “privacy” services seriously. i was hoping people would know better on here, compared to reddit