I've been using startpage lately and seem to prefer it to DDG, but they both can give inferior search.

At the risk of being repetitious, I think what I'd like is a completely private search engine that uses only a self-curated list of websites. A year or two of googling and using the good results from that would probably fix me for some time. As usual, switch to google if the results aren't good.

Getting rid of the cruft would be a nice thing.