I've moved the search engine topic to a separate thread to keep the other thread as a to do list. One general remark: I think every search engine and every website owner stores IP addresses for a certain period (default on debian is a week) for technical reasons. A reason why I would never use a static IP for browsing. Important question is: what do they use it for besides fighting DDOS and related stuff?
Duckduckgo: My doubts are referenced here:
https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/. US based, so a no-go.
Searx: The problem about any instance you don't host yourself is that you have to trust the person that's hosting it. As with any other self hosted service.
https://searx.me/is the developers instance but it doesn't work for me. Privacytools.io has made a name for themselves in the internet world
https://search.privacytools.io and as long as they don't sell out I'm willing to trust them.
https://suche.honigdachse.de/ is operated by someone affiliated with
Mike Kuketz and if he recommends it thats ok with me. He is also experimenting with his own instance
www.kuketz-suche.de. So as long as he doesn't sell out ... and he won't because he's a open source hardliner.
Martin Brinkmann sold out by the way:
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/10/07/ghack ... -everyone/ - to a software distributor famous for their shady business modell.
Qwant: French company founded by Eric Leandri and is certainly not financed by by their impressive base capital of €27 714,92 (cheers to publishing that though

). Funded by Axel Springer and European banks according to
https://www.cambonpartners.com/en/trans ... stissement. Eric Leandri is also president of
https://www.openinternetproject.net that mainly tries to lobby against Google
https://searchengineland.com/new-open-i ... ent-191955. Have a look at their member page, you'll find the biggest german publishers (which also means ad companies but mostly from the analog part of the business). F.e. Axel Springer Verlag, who's constantly sueing the company behind Adblock for years now. Qwant fits easily into their anti-Google agenda and their fight pro copyright legislation ("Art. 13" - german users will know what I'm talking about). So Quant is almost certainly financed by advertising companies. And open source is certainly not on their wishlist. All this doesn't mean anything negative for user privacy. I'm fairly certain they will abide by european data protection laws because everything else would compromise their political agenda. There is a political agenda though and it is not mine. But I'm not opposed to considering it.
They have a proprietary but OSM based map service too here:
https://www.qwant.com/maps.
Metager https://metager.org/ could be a candidate to replace startpage. Open source like searx but with the instance owned by a non-profit, financed with donations and memberships and advertising. "to receive this advertising, we give the first two blocks of the IP in connection with parts of the so-called user agent to our advertising partners". I think that's well enough de-personalized info. They also operate an anonimizing proxy where no IPs are stored. They have map services under
https://maps.metager.de.
I've used it in the 1990es, I should return. They still look the same

Anybody else willing to test the quality of their search results?