duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives
Qwant (france-based), startpage (NL-based), searxng (bunch of host options)
honorary mention to Stract which is currently totally useless because the results are so random, but hopefully in a few years it will be a proper alternative. they are indexing the web from scratch in order to not have to rely on existing data from other search engines (which is why the results are terrible right now lol)