The only difference between using Microsofts Bing search engine and the for all practical purposes Microsoft subsidiary Ecosia is that nearly half of the advertisement revenue generated by the Microsoft subsidiary Ecosia is donated to tree-planting projects.Д®cosia claims they do not send a 'Client ID' to Bing along with search queries if the web browser used is configured to send a 'Do Not Track' header along with each request. Search results and advertisement revenue are provided by Microsoft and Ecosia generates a 'Client ID' for each individual user which is sent to Microsoft along with search queries. This is a very positive endeavor which does offset some of the CO2 emissions generated by their in practice parent company Microsoft.Д®cosia is practically a Microsoft subsidiary and it should be seen as such. You can run your own Searx-instance on solar power or love and good vibrations and have zero environmental impact on your end (apart from hardware production and its inevitable disposal) and pull search results from Bing and other search engines without any effect what so ever on Microsofts environmental impact.Д®cosia donates 80% of its profits, which equals about 47% of its income, to non-profit organizations who plant trees in dozens of countries. One problem with that story is that Ecosias servers are merely acting as a front-end for Bing. They admit thatД®cosia statement on 'Renewable energy' The lack of third party JavaScript and other third party elements on their website strongly indicates that this particular part of their story does hold water.Дigging deeper into their privacy policy reveals a slight problem with their story. They also claim they do not use any external tracking tools. They also promise that they do not sell your data to advertisers. Running JavaScript is not required to produce results.Д®cosia story is that they 'Don't store your searches permanently' and they 'anonymize all searches within one week'. They do not have any third party tracking on their site. Most advertisement buyers will simply create a general campaign and have their advertisements display at whatever partnered search engines provide the traffic most relevant to the campaign.Д®cosias search site tries to run JavaScript from their own domain () and only their own domain. Doing so requires a huge amount of steps and hoops. It is possible to specifically target Ecosias and its user-base. Ecosia is simply one of many partners who are part of Microsofts advertisement network. Advertisements are sold and provided by Microsofts Bing Ads. A search for ' is linux better than windows' produces the exact same top three results on Bing, Ecosia and Yandex.ДЄll in all the Ecosia results are basically Microsoft Bings search results ordered slightly better.Д®cosia does not sell advertisement directly. Ecosias algorithm does not do anything in all cases. Neither Bing, Ecosia or Yandex produce the correct answer (It's clearly Nako Yabuki) and Yandex is the only one which comes close. The top two search results for ' who is the most talented iz*one member' on Bing have absolutely nothing to do with the k-pop group IZ*ONE while the top two results on Ecosia do. Ecosia does apply its own algorithm to the results Bing feeds it and that processing appears to have a positive effect.

The results are therefore limited to the results the 'Bing' search engine feeds Ecosia. Ecosia does not have any web crawler or search index of its own.

Search results for 'who is the most talented iz*one member' from Ecosia, Bing and Yandex.Д®cosia is a metasearch engine with Microsoft Bing as its only source.

Ecosia review