Whatever you do, you are paying for the search in some manner. With DuckDuckGo, you are being served non-targeted ads. If you go through the trouble of setting

Whatever you do, you are paying for the search in some manner. With DuckDuckGo, you are being served non-targeted ads. If you go through the trouble of setting anything up to avoid some of the public search engine pitfalls, you are paying with time and effort, and maybe even subscriptions on top like VPN and similar. Obviously, ad networks want people to have this mindset, and while I have no issue with "stick it to them", it's always going to be an uphill battle. I actually believe we need distributed and federated p2p search engine built, but trusting the results is hard with that: perhaps this is where blockchain approach (to store hashes of indexed pages?) could bring real value?