i also use ecosia. actually, ddg, startpage, kagi, or self-hosted search engines are just anonymous queries to google and bing. brave has its own index, but i d

i also use ecosia. actually, ddg, startpage, kagi, or self-hosted search engines are just anonymous queries to google and bing. brave has its own index, but i don't have a very positive impression of the brave browser. so if everything will eventually return to google and bing anyway, why not look at it from a different perspective and use it for reforestation. ecosia's policy is still to send ip addresses to partners like google and bing, but that's just the IP address, not the user profile. google might know where the query is coming from, but it doesn't know who i am. i don't see much point in that. anyway, i'm not doing anything shady; I just don't like feeling like I'm being exploited. but if i know i'm helping the community in some way or doing something meaningful just by querying through ecosia, then i'll accept revealing my ip address to them. oh, and ecosia is partnering with qwant to create its own index, and I will continue to support them