Most search engines make money with ads, including DDG. Plus, DDG has in the past explicitly whitelisted trackers from MS so I wouldn't trust them. They are definitely better than Google though (as low of a bar that is).

SearXNG (https://searx.space/) seems to be the best option from a privacy standpoint I found so far.

Maybe a differentiation between "you might also like" and "a 3rd party gave us money to show you this".

Permanently Deleted

I assume it's this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger.