We started a year or two ago as well, but our son is autistic and it’s hard to get him to change. He finally seems to have settled in now.

We use noai.DuckDuckGo.com now.

Been using DDG for years now, and have since turned off AI. My only issue with DDG, StartPage, and Ecosia, is that they don’t do their own indexing (AFAIK). I still use them, but have been looking into Kagi and Brave (I know they have their own issues as well) as I think they index independently of Google or Microsoft. With not having an independent index, then the search engine is at the mercy of the companies that do. Such as is Google wants to remove or deprioritize something, it would also be seen in StartPage. Again, that my understanding and it may be wrong.

The largest fully independent generalist search engines are Yandex (which is no better than Google/Bing, unless you want something that doesn’t deprioritize sites for DMCA reasons) and Mojeek. You may want to read A look at search engines with their own indexes, although it’s about a year out of date now.

I have routed duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com on my computer

I like this option a lot, but it’s way more frustrating to set this as a default search engine on (all?) mobile browsers than it should be.

You’ve probably done it already, but a quick howto for anyone else (on Firefox Mobile):

• Three dot menu -> Settings -> Search -> Default search engine
• Scroll to the bottom, press + Add search engine, put what you like in the Name box
• in the search string URL box put this: noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s
• Press Save, then select your newly named option for normal and private tabs as you like.

Kagi is the best few bucks I spend each month.

I’ll probably end up going back to Kagi when I’m working again. Can’t justify the extra expenses right now between them and a few others I’d like to pay for.

Another good one and you can also self-host your own instance, is SearXNG.