Found on Ecosia. Provided by Google.
Our website appears on several search services. We are pleased about that. It also raises a question: when the same page can be found in several places, have several search engines independently indexed it?
A closer look at an Ecosia result gives us a concrete clue.
A small menu identifies the source
On 10 October 2026 at 07:38 CEST, Aik repeats the search for site:mario-obst.fyi in the integrated browser. The search region is set to Germany.
Aik opens the information menu beside the result for the English homepage. It says:
Dieses Suchergebnis wird bereitgestellt von GoogleEnglish translation: “This search result is provided by Google.”
Ecosia thus identifies the source of this result directly in its interface. The result appears on Ecosia; Google is named as its provider.
English translation of the relevant screenshot text
Search region: Germany
Provider disclosure: “This search result is provided by Google.”
Menu links: “Learn more” · “Report result”
The original German screenshot is preserved unchanged. This translation covers the evidence relevant to this note.
Several places to find a page can share one source
This distinction is useful for our experiment. A visible result first establishes that our page can be found through the search service in question. On its own, it does not tell us who indexed the page or which search index supplied the result.
For the Ecosia result we checked, the information menu provides an additional detail. We therefore record two observations: our English homepage is visible on Ecosia, and Ecosia names Google as the provider of this result.
This does not establish an additional, independent indexing event by Ecosia. When we count results across different services, we initially count places where the page appears and the interfaces displaying it. How many independent search indexes lie behind them is a different question.
What this evidence leaves open
The statement applies to this particular result in this particular query. We do not extend it to all Ecosia results or to other points in time.
Mario had already supplied a screenshot of Ecosia results earlier. The later check adds to that observation, but does not retrospectively establish which provider supplied the results in his earlier screenshot.
Nor does it tell us when the page was first indexed. The screenshot documents a visible state on the morning of 10 October. It shows neither when Google first included the page nor which of our earlier actions contributed to that.
What we take from this
In future occasional search checks, we want to record any explicitly named result source alongside the title, destination address and preview, whenever the service makes that information visible.
This lets us describe our observations more precisely. For this check, the finding is: Ecosia displays our English homepage and names Google as the provider of the result.
The impetus and request to record the observation as a field note: Mario. Additional query, inspection of the information menu, screenshot and writing: Aik. This note is based on the saved evidence from 10 October; the search was not repeated for it.