I have been trying presearch out for the past few days. The results are pretty good for me. Better than DDG in most cases. My primary issues with it are:
Thanks for trying and sharing your findings!
I haven’t tried it yet that much but I noticed also, to my surprise, that the ad results are showing.
I understand that’s a rather big downside then for you if you use that feature. I do use it as well but occasionally.
It’s good to know that you found the results better than DDG. It has mostly worked well for my use case. I’ll be switching to Presearch for the coming days and try to ignore the ads .
Weird, for my tests it had worse results than both ddg and brave search 
Also it’s pretty slow, but let’s give new one some time 
It probably depends what you search for. My searches are mostly technical searches related to either Linux or programming.
For me DDG gives poor results on these types of queries. Because it is too inclusive. No matter what you do it does a fuzzy search to add more results which is a huge problem when you need exact results only.
The ones that aren’t technical, every search site does fine on for me.
It is slower than DDG for me but still sub-second.
https://www.stanventures.com/blog/top-search-engines-list/
https://www.searchenginemap.com/
*Edit: Baidu? = Chinese search engine. 
Just came across Neeva, created by ex-googlers, with the promises of no ads/affiliates, no trackers and no selling users data at 5$/month subscription.
Looks almost like a Netflix business model, with some personalisation based on user data, but with (re-ordered) search results from bing. Maybe there could be a niche userbase for this…
Edit: But the data sharing is done in some level with its service providers, Notably Microsoft.
Everything about it screams: “GRIFT!!111oneone” to me 
That being said, more players on market = better.
Can we consider a company you have to pay and give your contact information to, “Privacy respecting”
But they promised!!! 
Hrm…
If you connect Neeva to an external data source such as G Suite, Office 365, or Dropbox, we will process data we get from that external source, which may include personal information like email, documents, contacts & calendar. This information is used to show you and only you personal results when you search in Neeva.
When you use Neeva, we associate a limited amount of information about you with your account to make the product better for you. This information is automatically deleted after 90 days by default. This information will never be sold to anyone or used for the purpose of selling you products. You can see the list of things we associate with your account in our privacy policy.
BUT THEY PROMISED!!!1111 
https://search.disroot.org/ is not bad too, powered by SearX
Yeah, totally useless… Luke makes an excellent point.
I still find some useful stuff on DDG but i find myself going to certain sites i know where information can be found and searching specifically on those sites vs using a search engine these days.
Google and Bing are especially bad about giving me junk i dont want
I dunno. I’ve seen more convincing forest sprites.
I used to use DuckDuckGo. But a few month ago I had connection issues with ddg. Dont know why but the page just did not load. At that point I switched to qwant and I am still using it.
He has some valid concerns about search engines but his conclusion is wrong. Search engines will be important even in the future but they will eventually use different algorithms to sort the search results.
I do not agree that people should better use the in-app search functions, like searching directly in facebook or in twitter or in … We will still have a need for a one-stop-search-engine.
Just my 2 cents
ddg has a onion search page:
https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion
Use that with the tor-browser and you don’t need to trust the search engine anymore
Metager has also an Onion search:
http://metagerv65pwclop2rsfzg4jwowpavpwd6grhhlvdgsswvo6ii4akgyd.onion/en/
considering they can profile you based on how you type your search phrases and things you tend to search along with many other things besides IP and browser does this even provide enough protection from a search engine? Im not sure…
considering search engines get to know a lot of things about you because of what theyre used to do it seems like search engines much like email are a sore spot for privacy.