The best way to privately search the web is to not use a general purpose search engine in the first place if you can at all help it.

Instead of using DDG's !wiki or googling "wiki [topic]" you can configure a search keyword to send you to Wikipedia's search results page, cutting out the middleman. I have this done for a dozen or so sites I use frequently and this has cut my general purpose search engine usage down significantly.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

This is the sort of privacy enhancing feature that Firefox should streamline and advertise. I wonder if they don't make it known to users because it might influence how much money Google is willing to give them for being the default general purpose search engine..

The best solution I know for Wikipedia is to just host your own copy of it. Never need to send any queries out to the web. It's only around 100G with images. I use a simple url filter to change all wikipedia links to point at my local copy. Works like a charm. And fast. https://www.kiwix.org/en/

The UI for this feature barely even exists in Firefox -- you have to make a bookmark, and then edit it to replace the query with %s and add a keyword. There is also the half baked "one-click search engines" thing, but the button to "find more" just redirects to the extension store.

The Chrome UI is somewhat better and it also automatically creates these when you use a search somewhere, with a keyword equivalent to the site's domain.

I don't know why Mozilla doesn't just copy this old Opera UI: https://i.postimg.cc/1XCg1HG8/opera-search-edit.png

Can you show us where DDG has failed and continues to fail on the privacy front? It seems pretty decent to me.