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Ecosia - eco-friendly search engine

Dave H.

Revolutionary relativist
I came across this last night, and wondered if anyone else had heard of it?

It’s basically Bing under the bonnet, but apparently a bit more private (quite a lot more private than Google), and the USP is that they invest 80% of their profits in tree planting initiatives around the world. Millions planted so far, so they say.

As far as I can tell, it’s actually not too good to be true. Perhaps I’m missing something.

www.ecosia.org
 
My 11 year old niece pointed me at it. Seems good, although i can't find a way of importing favourites from another browser on my iPhone.
 
My 11 year old niece pointed me at it. Seems good, although i can't find a way of importing favourites from another browser on my iPhone.

Ah, there’s a difference between the search engine itself and the browser app. You could use the search engine with your existing browser (and its favourites list).

But unless/until Apple add it to the default search engine list, you’d have to go to the website every time you wanted to search rather than using the address bar as a search box too. And in fairness, that’s quite a retro PITA now we’re all used to the combined approach.

That said, I could manually transfer mine pretty quickly if I wanted. How many favourites do you have?
 
But unless/until Apple add it to the default search engine list, you’d have to go to the website every time you wanted to search rather than using the address bar as a search box too. And in fairness, that’s quite a retro PITA now we’re all used to the combined approach.

Yes, Apple is a PITA, but what you could do is set a new browser Tab to always start with a specified page, so ecosia.org for example.
So searching means hitting Command-T for a new Tab an searching there.
 
Yes, Apple is a PITA, but what you could do is set a new browser Tab to always start with a specified page, so ecosia.org for example.
So searching means hitting Command-T for a new Tab an searching there.

I've discovered that there's another reasonably handy way of doing it on desktop Safari.

Go to www.ecosia.org and pin the tab. When you subsequently click on the tab and search, it shows the results in the same tab. But if you click on any of the results, it opens them in a new, unpinned tab. So the pinned tab stays on ecosia.

Ok, it's a page with a list of results for the last thing you searched for, but the search box is still there at the top. So only one extra click compared with using the normal address bar method.
 
Unfortunately all other search engines are completely lame compared to Google.... As a hater of "big brother" and "huge corp PLC" I'd love to move to another browser but they're "broken" compared to Google!
 
Depends how you use them IMO. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default for quite a while and don’t feel like I’m missing out. And if there’s something particular missing, I can always do a one off google.

So given that it’s basically Bing, Ecosia actually feels a bit cushy and plush to me now. And google feels a bit overbearing and cluttered.

Totally get it if everything feels crap compared to the big G, they’re #1 for a reason. But it does depend somewhat on what you’re used to, and you can get used to other alternatives.
 
I use DDG. I find it's only shortcoming compared to Google is that it doesn't give multiple results from single websites, unless you ask it specifically which can be a drag.
 
I like the idea of planting trees, so for the last fortnight, since I first heard about it, I've been using Ecosia, then DDG if that doesn't work, then Google if I have to. So far, if the little icon is to be believed, I've planted around a dozen trees
 
Just had a quick look, and without any particular effort, I've now done a bit over 300 searches across my various devices.

At the 45 searches per tree rate they advertise, that means about 7 trees planted.

That's pretty cool, considering it's made virtually no difference to me at all.
 


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