What do you think about Ecosia? I have a habit of using Ecosia as the default search engine. And I do this because a while ago I was looking for a private and ethical alternative to Google.
In my view, Ecosia is a very ethical organization committed to its mission of acquiring money to finance natural restoration projects. I admit that I haven’t looked into it in depth so far, but they have a habit of releasing transparency reports.
The problem, if you can call it that, is that Ecosia isn’t very private, since it sends data to Bing to make it work. However, I think there’s good reason to trust the Ecosia organization even with this. After all, in their marketing, they’re concerned about creating a private search engine, or at least collecting only minimal data. So maybe it’s not so private now, but and in the future?
They have already shown themselves to be committed to their mission and that is why I trust them.
I’ve been using it for about a year. I’m not sure if privacy is really a big problem. It might depend on your search phrase. I don’t think Bing/MS can identify you that easily when searching with Ecosia.
It works well for me most of the time, though. I barely need to use Google.
Things will really get exciting once they have their own index.