Whether one can plant trees in Africa by clicking on advertisements https://www.ecosia.org/ with Happiness Officer as staff or trying a serious alternative like metager –  http://www.metager.de . The problem remains: Where do the data, the search indexes come from? Almost all of them transfer their data from the programming interfaces (API) of Google and Bing/Yahoo. For this, either payment must be made, the placement of advertisements or the transmission of user data must be accepted. Some of the alternative search engines still let additional crawlers run across some special areas. But you’re not master of data. If Google and Bing/Yahoo set their API, all of these business models will be destroyed, because a crawler via Wikipedia and Chef can’t create a compelling search engine.
Google’s interest is clear: Google has the monopoly, and if you attack it and destroy the company, this API is an argumentation that you even offer data to the competition themselves. It is basically a building block for maintaining the monopoly.
Where does the data come from?

Wo kommen die Daten her?

It’s amazing that these overviews claim that the search results are as good as searching with Google – which clearly contradicts my experience.
Baidu and Yandex, which according to search engine experts each build an index independently, remain completely hidden.