For your firefox issue, does your search string start with “site:”? I’ve had issues with “site:” at the start of search strings apparently being interpreted as a url protocol. Prefixing searches with “and “ seemed to help.
works for me.
Switched back to Google this year because DDG started to be less accurate overall, how's your experience
I noticed a lot more AI crap in Bing with a Duck. It’s still my default for simple searches but I now use ChatGPT or Google for more advanced searches.
Like DDG is a proxy for Bing, so is Startpage a proxy for Google, if you haven ，t tried that.
You should try Kagi.
It works for me from iOS, I only see sites that end with .ca.gov.