As they say in Italian "If my Grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike"

Sure... that's an "interesting" premise but we live in our World, where a lot of American companies are structured the way they are by design. US companies get money from venture capital. That capital is solely designed to dominate. VC money is NOT a loan you get from a bank where you provide a collateral. No VC money is targeting 1 thing : market dominance and 10x returns. Your mom&pop shop will never get VC money because they never say they'll corner the croissant market, rather they say might sell some baked goods to some people in your limited neighborhood. VC money will NEVER accept such a deal because it might eventually get 2x, at best, and the tiny shop does not even need a lot of capital, just enough for the oven, few people, etc. Peanuts in terms of investment money.

So... American companies are not "evil" because they want to or because a lack of luck. No, rather they become so because of the very structure money is made in the US. The Silicon Valley isn't special because of Stanford or Berkeley and so many smart grad students. No it's special because it pulls people from the entire World who dream of dominating markets. It then either select them or transform then select... and in the end you get the same kind of companies with the same kind of strategy with the same kind of money doing the same thing : domination by lowering price, cornering a marketing, raising price, enshittifying. Why? Because it works. It's a proven business model. Right now it works on ads, and thus privacy... but if another model comes, it'll use that.

TL;DR: it's not perfect but it sure beats most if not all of BigTech depending of course on your needs.

For VPN, I recommend Mullvad instead: https://mullvad.net/en

All I can definitively say is that it's better than Google in most use cases. The Hide AI images function is nice, but it's not perfect. They don't shove as many junk links at the top, though you're still gonna get a lot of AI articles but that's for every search engine nowadays. I use DDG as my daily driver.

By design, DDG doesn't localize search results as far as I know. The only time I use Google is if I'm looking for a product in a store near me or if I'm really desperate otherwise.

I would choose DDG Browser over Chrome and Edge, and Duck.ai over ChatGPT etc

Alas we don't live in such a world and I think, as much as possible, it's safer to not trust much of the US apps and services. Like I said, as much as possible I want to use made in the EU software and services, or EU-made forks of those. But it's not always doable.

For example, I use the Vivaldi Browser (Chromium) and Waterfox (Firefox fork). I use LibreOffice for writing. I have multiple emails, all EU-based (Proton, Infomaniak + my French-hosted own web domain/email). I don't use AI, but if I did I would use the French Mistral (is that its name? Not sure about that) and maybe give Proton a try too. I use one cloud from Swiss and another from Germany (this one E2EE).

Search is where I'm stuck. I use the French Qwant but I also use (and pay good money) to use the US-based Kagi search engine. To me, Kagi is unrivaled and offers a mix of features (great search results and many cool options to filter said results), ease of noise-removal (no ads, no seo and the ability to remove specific domains from search results,...) and they promise to not track us at all. Alas, since it's a US company and since they can't rise above US law, I simply consider that whatever I search using them is compromised.

I remember using DuckDuckGo a few years ago and I quite liked it. But if I have to use a US search engine that must be Kagi. It's really good and, nope, I'm not sponsored to say that... As a matter of fact, being a paid-user, it is I that is sponsoring them ;)

I just did the seven-day trial, and I personally really like the VPN and the anonymous AI with the advanced models. The only downside is there are limitations. You can only upload one photo per chat, and you can't upload documents for review. But all things considered, it's pretty awesome. I really enjoy it. I probably won't pay for premium, but if I were rich enough, I definitely would.

They're still operating an ad based business model.
Not really all the interested.

All my homies use Kagi.

Some of their products are very cool, some are mediocre. Their browser is not available on linux, which is a shame and it's android version is essentially webview resulting in security and privacy concerns. I don't find their search results very good (especially since only Google is allowed to scrape reddit) so I use Mullvad Leta instead. I still use it for image search however. Duck AI is very good, use it all the time.