Have you tried searx? There’s a lot of open source instances. If you want to use Google with some privacy there’s also whoogle. Tbh I haven’t tried any, just read about them. Hope this helps!
I would recommend searxng its a little bit better and yeah.You can easily self host that too :) Its a meta (not the company) search engine. It requests multiple search engine. Its a really good way to aggregate multiple results from different search engine.
Isn't that ultimately like a VPN though? i.e. a different server is making the requests to those search engines and forwarding results to you? Why not just use a VPN and access your favorite directly if you don't care about aggregated results?
Brave search, they use own search index, unlike most other search engines, including DDG or Start page.
Mojeek, also good option with own search index, but UI is not very good.
Searxng instance could work, if you trust who host it. Try https://search.disroot.org/ for example. That is meta search, they collect results from other search engines.
I stopped using brave when they made brave replace links with their afíliate links and the CEO was shown to have donated a lot of money to anti-gay causes/politicians