Ecosia feels like a scam like Brave browser no?
I use it, and I can’t make any guarantees obviously, but Ecosia publishes their financial reports, and in my environmental science major, we’ve had guest lectures from places like Brazil that has talked about how Ecosia has contributed to their ecological restoration efforts. It does use Bing as its its search engine and advertisement provider (though with a lot less data collected than actual Bing), so libre enthusiasts may be (understandably) put off by it (I just use it through a VPN, Bing doesn’t execute any JavaScript on Ecosia so they can’t fingerprint your browser). Maybe you can make the argument that its ecological contributions aren’t worth the drawbacks, but I don’t think it’s an outright scam.
They also host on AWS, use google mail, in addition to assigning visitors a 7 day Bing ID if that adds to the vibe.
Bing (Microsoft actually) is also not running on renewable. If someone is in search for search engine I recommend MetaGer.
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They don’t literally use Bing; MetaGer is metasearch, it is free -as in free speech- and open source, and runs on %100 renewable energy. I don’t know much about you but this is a pretty good deal for me.
And where did you get the idea of personalized ads on MetaGer? This is their privacy policy and they say they don’t serve personalized ads but you don’t have to take their word on it because, you know, the source code is public.
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Ecosia is not metasearch, it is more like Duckduckgo
