Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.
Sorry, I forgot to check for replies til now. I'm using almost the exact set of services the other commenter is, minus mullvad (proton is fine for me), backblaze (I have a homelab with a lot of redundant storage capacity and have enough important stuff backed up to the cloud in other ways I'm fine with having to rebuild the rest if something big happens), and standard notes (but I have been considering switching to it just this week, just haven't done the research).