Two corrections, Tutanota is just called Tuta now and SearX is no longer maintained, SearXNG is the active fork.

As far as YT goes, I use Freetube and don’t have any complaints. Available for win/mac/linux

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

Ah, sorry, I guess I implied there’s something nefarious going on with Startpage. But there isn’t as far as I can tell. I just trust Mullvad more based on their track record. If you’re happy using Startpage keep using it.

I’ve had good luck with searxng.site, but yeah, public instances aren’t going to have the uptime and reliability of Google or DDG. Think of public instances as a test drive. You get a taste of what it can do but it’s a much better ride when you self-host.

I just checked and it doesn’t look like it (if you want to search for DDG bangs here’s the link, just scroll down a bit.). But you could always just add Leta as a search engine in your browser preferences and set a keystroke for it. For example, type L into the URL bar then space and it’ll use Leta for your query. (Note, I use Firefox, not sure if it’s the same with Chromium based browsers).

For what it’s worth, Mullvad recently opened up Leta to people without Mullvad VPN accounts. It’s a google/brave search proxy so pretty much what Startpage claims to do, but I trust Mullvad to actually respect my privacy more than I do Startpage.

I haven’t noticed any issues with the quality of DDG results, but if you feel the results are lackluster, you could try a metasearch engine like SearXNG. You can self-host it or use one of the many public instances maintained by the community. The main advantage, apart from the privacy focused aspect of the project, is that you can pull results from multiple search engines with a single query. It’s highly customizable too. You can configure it exactly how you want.