[wkornewald]

I’ve recently switched to startpage.com - they use Google for high quality search results, but anonymize all search requests and show non-personalized, non-tracking ads solely based on my current search term. Also, they’re based in Europe/Netherlands.

I’m not affiliated with them. Just a happy user.

[NoGravitas]

In my experience, when Google searches are better than DDG (which is not always), it's because the results are customized to your Google account and search history. StartPage generally gives me worse results than DDG, despite using Google as a backend.