I would not recommend DuckDuckGo. My goto for the last year has been Qwant

Try these:

• Qwant https://www.qwant.com/

• Swisscows https://swisscows.com/

• Startpage https://www.startpage.com/

• Webcrawler http://www.webcrawler.com/

• SearX https://searx.bar/search

• Result Hunter https://resulthunter.com/

• Metager https://metager.org/

• Giburu https://gibiru.com/

• Yandex https://yandex.com/

• Lukol https://www.lukol.com/

Some other resources:

• The guide to restoring your online privacy. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/

• Awesome Privacy - Github https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy#anime

• Privacy Tools https://www.privacytools.io/

None of these will be 100% perfect but there is much good information here.

I think the most important step you can make is to get rid of your gmail account and log in and go through and delete your data that google saves (searches, trips, from location tracking) in every tentacle of google after you have exported all of your data with a takeout. You'll have to change your email at all of your favorite sites. Other email providers will let make it easy to import all of your gmail and calendars. After you have migrated, delete all of your mail in gmail and from trash and setup a redirect to have any lingering email forwarded to your new address. After a while your forwarded email should be just spam to gmail.