I am sure there is a good reason for this. I am looking for alternatives to google, and these to be the ones that pop-up most often.
RESOLVED: I used up my 100 searches in kagi pretty quickly, and the experience was really nice. I am quite anti-subscription, so I won’t continue using it. I eliminated brave from my search due to the crypto stuff and whatnot. I am now using mojeek, which gave me better results over DDG when searching for niche stuff. Also I like mojeeks interface a lot more.
You could also try the ddg lite version: no JavaScript, no ad, no ai https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
Oh, I just realized that I can set this up as my default search from the URL bar!
I already had DDG as the default search in Firefox, but I was slightly annoyed that it kept throwing in AI and other stuff if I searched from a private window or something. I just added DDG Lite as a new search engine (use “https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=%25s” as the URL), and I set it to the default. We’ll see how that works for me.