In terms of result quality? In my opinion, based on my particular search habits:

Kagi > SearXNG > Brave > Startpage/Google > DDG/Ecosia/Bing

Everyone is going to have their own opinions on each of those companies, but from a results lens, that’s what I find to be most/least effective.

Like all Google products, they will still make a halfhearted attempt to make it as useful as they can before absolutely destroying it with ads

Guessing Edge by default sent you to Bing, no surprise the DDG results look similar, given that they use Bing under he hood. They shuffle rankings slightly, but it’s the same index.

You can also use Ecosia, if your prefer a different shade of lipstick on your pig search results.

There’s not really a strong player in the open source search space.

Mwmnl exists, but per their own readme:

The quality is a long way’s off from matching the commercial engines at the moment

Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other’s indexes.

That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:

If you’re not paying for it; you are the product!

For what it’s worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.