What is the best privacy search engine in 2026?

No single answer — depends on what you value. Kagi is the paid ad-free option with the best long-tail quality; the trade-off is an account binding to whatever you sign up with. DuckDuckGo is the no-account mainstream choice; index is Bing-derived. Brave Search is no-account with a largely independent index. Mojeek has been independent since 2004 and runs its own crawler — smaller index, no Bing/Google dependency. Startpage proxies Google results without passing user metadata to Google. SearXNG is a self-hostable meta-search. For users specifically wanting an independent index, Mojeek is the conservative pick.