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 used it until I switched to kagi. It was fine. Search results are better on Kagi and I’m not giving any information to Microsoft, but planting trees is nice.
Isn’t Kagi pretty expensive though? When I tested it vs Brave and DDG, I was basically unimpressed to the point where anything more than a buck a month seems out of line. (I can’t even remember what they actually wanted, just that it seemed like a lot more than that.)
I mean, running a search engine is one of the most expensive things you can do, so the fact it’s so cheap is honestly astounding.
Did you actually use many of the features? Like pinning certain websites, blocking or deranking others, setting up shortcuts like !w, etc? Also kagi has provably private searches, so you can make web searches without anyone retaining a log of what you’re doing, which no other search provider can do, much less tries to do.
So no, I don’t use a lot of those features. But having to go to $10/mo for unlimited searches is laughable pricing, IMHO. Even $5 for 300 searches is ridiculous. That’s basically a week of searches?
I respect the idea of it, but my feeling is that they will never grow the business past a very niche offering if that is how they’re going to price it. And I say that as a very privacy oriented person.