Duckduckgo proxies bing search results (ober the api, they aren’t chad scrapers) and is therefore is under the foot of microsoft. This has forced them to whitelist ms trackers in their privacy tools but I haven’t heard anything bad about the search engine.

Startpage scrapes google results so isn’t under anyones foot. It has had some controversy due to being bought by an ad company but they haven’t seemed to do anything bad yet

In all, startpage is better than duckduckgo