I thought it was clear by now that duckduckgo is really Microsoft under a different name. Microsoft ads, Microsoft servers, everything DDG is really Microsoft. I found that searx.org works very well for search, and browsing is as private as it can get with various settings in regular Firefox and the free Chromium browsers. Brave may also be good for most things, but I don't trust their baked-in crypto wallet and this ad thing they have going on either.