You sort of didn’t read my whole post and just looked at the last bit - I pay for excellent search results with Kagi, the fact it’s also private (because I pay) is a bonus. However for local searches, I find Kagi is a bit US centric, so a simple !g bang operator gives me a private search through Google which still excels at these types of things… for anyway, who knows what Kagi has up their sleeves 🤷🏻‍♂️

A VPN with Google would still give me rubbish Google search results and marginal privacy against Google’s algorithms (their fingerprinting likely knows it’s me anyway), and I’d need to keep switching it on and off to make full use of my 1gb/s cable internet speed.