There is also an Metasearch engine which, like Ecosia, create search revenues to support several charity projects (Environment, Education, Medical Support), Max-Impact (FOSS)

https://llarryyllarryy.github.io/Max-Impact-Search/

I use Ecosia nearly exclusively.

I don't like it as much as DDG; which has a somewhat better privacy focus, more widgets, and better support for "bangs".
But the bangs I really care about are still there, it's European and working on a European search index along with Quant, and the trees are pretty cool too.

As is it still relies on either Bing or Google for the results, but oh well. So does basically every alternative search engine, and I'd rather go through Ecosia than directly through those two.

Ecosia is better than using big tech directly, that's for sure. But ofc it's not private.

The money for the trees comes from something, but at least it's used for something nice.

To care more about the environment than privacy is a fair choice.

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.

I do have an opinion about Ecosia, but it's just based on feelings, so it doesn't even make sense to share it. Apologies for not answering your question.

Instead I would like to focus on this point:

Ecosia isn't very private, since it sends data to Bing

Also DuckDuckGo does this, but they aggregate and anonymize that data before forwarding it to Bing. That's probably the best they can do without building their own first-party infrastructure. I would imagine Ecosia does the same.

I like trees so I use it.

me gusta https://github.com/searxng/searxng

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.

I use Ecosia daily. Obviously, it isn’t private but I believe that is worth the sacrifice especially since they’re legitimately planting trees.

It works for me.

It's there since long enough to know that, if privacy was on their roadmap, it would already be there. That's my point of view, but I haven't take a look at their stance about it, it might be in the works, I just don't know.