Have you already heard about a search engine called DuckDuckGo? I am aware of it for, I think, far more than a year. And recently I have (subjectively) noticed a rising amount of posts related to DuckDuckGo, especially in the Open and Free Software Aspects (while I was writing this post, Linux Mint announced to start using DuckDuckGo as default search engine). It looks like more and more people are looking for an alternative to Google, which does not track users' data. I have had a critical view on DuckDuckGo before and still have it, though undoubtedly it has some positive facets.

To take away some illusions beforehand: DuckDuckGo is neither free nor open source software, but proprietary, and only some parts are open-sourced. Although i have not had a deeper look into the source, it pretty much looks like that the ranking algorithm e.g. is not open. They only stress the importance of inbound links, which is hopefully not a too strong ranking factor...

Nevertheless, the best way to get good rankings (in pretty much all search engines) is to get links from high quality sites like Wikipedia. Source