I feel like there are probably some ad based search engines which are privacy and service oriented, but in general even for those there remains a misalignment problem. Hence if I don’t want to be a product now or in the future, what good search engines are there that I can pay for?
It’s not paid but you could try self hosting searxng. Since it’s FOSS there isn’t the conflict of interest issue, although be aware it’s a meta search engine so relies on the quality of common search engines. And your IP could be traced if it’s not connected through a commercial vpn just like using the search engines directly.