[deleted] Startpage has always had the mistrust of the privacy community due to its owner being an ad company. But the privacy policy was good and it seemed OK too until a while ago. I don't remember if they started using trackers or something changed in the privacy policy, but you definitely shouldn't use it at all anymore.
I default to Brave. It searches Reddit which is helpful for some tech-support type of searches. But I feel it's index is smaller, so sometimes I need ddg to get what I need.
DDG uses Bing and it has openly implemented political censorship a while ago, which also sucks. So I try to avoid. It has "in-line" translations (you search "whistle in Italian", for example, and it shows the translation in the results page) , which is helpful.
For searches in local language (and I assume all or most non-English languages), Brave is useless and ddg is OK at best. So I need some Google results which I get through SearX. Instances get rate limited all the time, so you need https://searx.neocities.org/.
I never managed to get it working with Vanadium or Brave, so you need Mull to use it from the address bar.