DuckDuckGo has been great for search for many years now. Yes, about once a year I have a really hard search where for some reason I very strongly suspect that Google might be better, so I google. But that's about it.

The only way Google makes money off of me is via YouTube ads. When you're not logged in and always appear as a new visitor due to browsing in private mode, ads are many and annoying.

I agree. I use DDG and Firefox.

I think the thing that pissed me off the most was realizing that searches done in incognito mode (which explicitly implies a level of privacy) are still tied to my Google account (the whole Gaia/ non-Gaia thing).

Is there a reason you aren't using an ad-blocker?

I use Privacy Badger, which is fairly good at filtering out most annoying ads, so I haven't really considered using an extra ad blocker. I guess I should consider one, if only for YouTube.