given that you’re looking at vpns I’m assuming you can’t do port forwarding on your network. Am I right?
Have you seen zerotier? it lets you create a virtual network. super easy to setup but in the default configuration you’re relying on a third party service. not sure if that’s ok with you.
The most user-friendly way to do it is hosting it on a https server. for this you need a reverse proxy. checkout caddy. or if you’re on docker try traefik.
Most home isps don’t let you open port 80 and 443 so you have to use alternative ports which is ok for https but it will make renewing certificates really hard. you have to do it with dns. if it works great. but in my experience it was usually finicky.
I’ve been using duckduckgo for years. It used to be great. Nowadays whenever I use it I have to redo the search with !g or !b again to see the same garbage results and maybe between the three of them I find what I was looking for.
Now I’m using searx with 3 4 enignes selected to at least get their results in the same page. It’s slower than I like it to be but overall it’s faster than redoing the search in multiple engines.