I had been using DDG for years but switched to SearXNG last fall after reading about it on Lemmy. It’s a privacy focused meta-search engine that can even be self-hosted. It’s wildly customizable and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.

If you’re not interested in self-hosting, or just want to test drive it a bit, there are lots of public instances you can use as well.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

List of public instances

Rutendo 24

I agree. There’s also just no reason to give Meta the benefit of the doubt here. Bug or not they’ve done nothing to earn such a charitable response from anyone.