Ecosia uses the ad revenue from your searches to plant trees where they are needed the most. By searching with Ecosia, you’re not only reforesting our planet, but you’re also empowering the communities around our planting projects to build a better future for themselves. Give it a try!
It's great that the option exists for those that don't care about their digital footprint and also want to just passively contribute without "spending" a cent. Not for everyone for sure.
You’re right, your IP is anonymized after 1 week. Their privacy policy seems great to me. I just turn off uBlock origin for Ecosia and don’t mind quickly scrolling past a couple of ads at the top of results.
It’s my firefox default search and I rack up a ton of trees for doing many quick and basic searches. If I ever need a more complex search, I use a different site. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing commitment.
Been using it for over 10 years. I have loved the transparency reports, and only wish there were other social and environmental programs we could help with an idea like this. You know, other than freerice.
Its powered by Bing which is meh but I don't mind it so much. If I don't get good results I throw in "#g" in my search and it will run the query with Google.
honestly, i'm using for a week and i'm a pretty technical person, i always get good results searching about technical issues and linux(thats a pretty niche too) i can't complain, but maybe with others affairs it's isn't so good?, anyway good to know about that shortcut
The first 20ish results of Google are either shops, YouTube or Google just struck out words of my search on it's own. Google search has already been ruined by them.
And I will never click on ads, I can't even stand seeing them, so there would be no revenue anyway. I want search results, not what some algorithm thinks should become my next shopping trip.
I moved to Duck Duck Go a while ago, partly for privacy reasons and partly because Google was becoming very top heavy with ads. It’s still a better search engine so I’ll use it occasionally, but only if DDG is really not getting what I need.
Do you know how good Ecosia is in terms of privacy? If it’s as good as DDG, then sure I’d use it.
But it still doesn't solve the issue though of being required to look at corporate ads which are designed to increase consumption in order to solve climate issues. We will never be able to advertise our way out of this.
I know it's not a perfect solution but considering the options, it's better to "sell" my attention to corporate ads in exchange of planting trees than nothing. Even then, I rarely see ads after whitelisting the site.
As far as my research goes, Ecosia seems quite reputable and I support their mission. If they're proven to be otherwise in the future, I won't have a problem to jump ship.
Have you tried the paid search engine Kagi? It's the best search engine I've used. No adverts, Really fast results and you can customise which domains you want to see in the results.
Are the results good? I looked into it recently and thought the sample results on their webpage were poor. For their example “Steve Jobs” Search three of the top results where just the same Wikipedia page but in different languages
Psh, nah I don't care, and I don't think this person was intentionally reposting. I think they just had the same idea. Plus, this post is more popular, and I want everyone to plant as many trees as they can!
I was thinking about it because I recalled people using it, and was wondering if it had its own search engine or they were just embedding Google or Bing in their page. Apparently it is the latter.