Nice post.
You should also look at search engines like "startpage.com", I say this because although duck-duck-go is extremly privacy oriented but sometimes the results are less than satisfactory, there is a feeling that "google"-would-for-sure-had-found-me-what-I-was-looking-for .

And this was the nagging feeling that led me to "startpage.com". The engine essentially searches on google for you and returns the results minus the tracking.