Realistically I don't expect any benevolence from any of the corporates that run all the popular search engines. (Even DDG is a private company with millions of

Realistically I don't expect any benevolence from any of the corporates that run all the popular search engines. (Even DDG is a private company with millions of dollars invested in it). So my choice, as you rightly guessed, is limited to compartmentalising data collection, I also wanted to choose the best non-US competitor of Google - Yandex (Russian), Baidu (Chinese) and (later) Qwant (European). Yandex is the best among them. To further compartmentalise data collection, I don't use Yandex exclusively and sometimes go directly to specialised sites for the answer. (For e.g. Stackoverflow for programming queries, IMDB for TV and movies, Wikipedia for some queries, etc. ... this is now easy since browsers allow us to add custom search engines to them.)