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.
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.
You should try measuring your searches. I also thought I used a ton of searches, as a software dev I search a lot. When I first switched I was sure I was going to be using several thousand searches a month. I was barely using more than 300. With Google it was at 800-900.
Probably depends on the person.