Michael

I’m guessing it’s due to which other instances they federate with and how recently they synced.
Even more annoying is that one instance might show 4x as many comments on the same post as another instance.

I’ve been pretty happy with Startpage. I used DDG prior and often ended up frequently using Google as a backup.
The only time I find myself resorting to Google now is for cached pages when a site is down or a subreddit went dark.