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). One might make the argument that its ecological contributions aren’t worth the drawbacks compared to libre search engines, but I don’t think it’s an outright scam.

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