[RodRiquez]

OK David, thanks for your advice.

I have had Clara HD for about 18 months.
Google did used to work fine & this dictionary/web feature worked fine, but recently (few months) I kept seeing a cookie page, so I changed my beta browser home preference to use duckduckgo & that has worked well when using the browser directly.
However, the built-in search, in book reading, is only google.

Wikipedia & duckduckgo work fine, its just google I have this problem with.

After I posted here initially I then started getting the Google 'upgrade browser' message - i dont know if this was because I had failed the cookie questionnaire to their liking.
The cookie page shows a long page of google terms & conditions & you have to either 'sign in' or 'customise' - customise give a long page of opt-in / opt-out options for adverts & sharing data etc etc - I couldnt get through this task because the check boxes etc didnt work on the page using Clara.

This morning the "upgrade browser" page I was stuck with yesterday has gone back to the cookie-page. (I think they blacklist your IP if you fail the cookie page answers )
This time I chose to log-in with Google & then the search went through normally.
However, if I search for another word, even immediately, I have to go through the process again of logging-in or answering the cookie questions.

I moved from Japan to the UK a few months ago, im not sure when the problem started but it was certainly not the case in Japan. I dont have VPN but I am using my mobile phone as a wifi hotspot.