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.
I use Ecosia nearly exclusively.
I don't like it as much as DDG; which has a somewhat better privacy focus, more widgets, and better support for "bangs".
But the bangs I really care about are still there, it's European and working on a European search index along with Quant, and the trees are pretty cool too.
As is it still relies on either Bing or Google for the results, but oh well. So does basically every alternative search engine, and I'd rather go through Ecosia than directly through those two.