I have used SearXNG for a while, but I switched to LibreX after the search engine started glitching. Recently, though, LibreX has stopped returning any results. I am currently on Mojeek, but the results aren't that great.
I have also tried Qwant, but I wasn't too keen on it. Startpage will be impractical, as I use a VPN and this engine often blocks me because of it. I don't want to use Brave Search for a number of reasons. MetaGer has too many important features behind its paywall. I'm not sure about DuckDuckGo, but I could use it if there was no other option.
I found Brave Search became better and its Summarizer works really well, a lot of search queries are answered right there. I absolutly love they have links to google, bing and mojeek after several results, so you just quick jump there if you think results are not good. Also they seem not to alter results to politics or ethics, as DDG does.
I'm not sure if it's because DDG uses Bing for its results, but I feel like that might be why the results in DDG are like that. Might be coming directly from Bing, unless something happened with DDG that I don't know about.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ their results are proprietary process, based on own crawlers and partners like bing, yahoo, yandex, etc. If Bing blacklists something DDG will be affected too.
As for something happened? Check this https://lemmy.ml/post/31321 it is not happened, but always was. DDG is just not very good. Sure if results suits you, than why not, it is ok.