Based on several videos I've seen in the past Ecosia is mostly greenwashing. Not sure if they recently changed something in their business practices but apparantly they planted vast amount of monoculture trees in relatively small areas. Thus, the majority of the trees just died due to lack of light, water and nutrients.
Yeah that's a problem with a lot of these "green" projects. The idea is good, the drive is commendable, but the implementation is so fucked it wasted 90%+ of the effort.
And of course like modern "organically grown"-labels, it helps sell your product despite mostly being empty words.
I stopped using them because I realized I was still selling my data for those trees. Went to Brave, left because image search is shit and ceo is a homophobe. Now I'm on ddg
I've been trying out Searx the last few days since I saw a few people recommend it on another post. I've had varying results, and have had to go back to google a couple of times (and was genuinely shocked when it actually got me the results I was looking for, which Searx wasn't even close on that time). Hopefully it gets better with time, and also we don't find out it's run by a bigot..