I'd be okay with a paid subscription service if I got privacy and some other things as well. There's room for both free and pay. Duckduckgo is ok, but not google. Would be nice to have google, without the bias and without the privacy issues.
One inevitable and useful bias a search engine has is the bias against spam. It's aligned with the interests of the user.
There can be (and are) biases that are against the users' interests but are aligned with operator's: promotion of some content, censorship of other content. This bias I would rather see gone.
In that case a Google without the privacy issues is basically the same as duckduckgo.
Payment and privacy are a very problematic combination, especially where end-to-end encryption is essentially impossible.
You pretty much get to choose one or the other.