this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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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.

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[–] desmosthenes@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago
[–] tyler@programming.dev 10 points 3 hours ago

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.

[–] bruce965@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 1 points 28 minutes ago

no, ddg uses bing's searches plus its own little index, but you never touch bings server, ddg does it for you, data being sent to bing comes from their servers not your pc

[–] kinkles@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 hours ago

I like trees so I use it.

[–] heiligerbimbam@lemmy.wtf 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

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.

[–] lsjw96kxs@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

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.