Your enemy’s enemy is your friend. It’s “safe” as it will not try to steal your crenditials. Although it is a privacy nightmare itself but think as people in China wouldn’t care much about Google’s privacy policy as noone will use the information against them.
Self-host yourself is the safest option, I do.
SearXNG, there’s nothing much else to say.
SearXNG is the king
They are less invasive on the privacy front, but they also push their products much harder down user’s throat due to less revenue from less accurate ads, just look at DDG’s frontpage.
I also found them self-censoring towards IPs from China, albeit this could be the direct result of using Bing’s search results.
It’s much easier to compare it with something like SearXNG which has the same core principle, without ads, without censorships, without invasive marketing.
To me, Brave or DuckDuckGo are as malicious as Google
E-cigarettes is designed to replace cigarettes nowadays, not to help you quit smoking.