What do you think about Ecosia? I have a habit of using Ecosia as the default search engine. And I do this because a while ago I was looking for a private and ethical alternative to Google.
In my view, Ecosia is a very ethical organization committed to its mission of acquiring money to finance natural restoration projects. I admit that I haven’t looked into it in depth so far, but they have a habit of releasing transparency reports.
The problem, if you can call it that, is that Ecosia isn’t very private, since it sends data to Bing to make it work. However, I think there’s good reason to trust the Ecosia organization even with this. After all, in their marketing, they’re concerned about creating a private search engine, or at least collecting only minimal data. So maybe it’s not so private now, but and in the future?
They have already shown themselves to be committed to their mission and that is why I trust them.
I don’t like it as much as DDG; which has a somewhat better privacy focus, more widgets, and better support for “bangs”.
But the bangs I really care about are still there, it’s European and working on a European search index along with Quant, and the trees are pretty cool too.
As is it still relies on either Bing or Google for the results, but oh well. So does basically every alternative search engine, and I’d rather go through Ecosia than directly through those two.
There is also an Metasearch engine which, like Ecosia, create search revenues to support several charity projects (Environment, Education, Medical Support), Max-Impact (FOSS)
I do have an opinion about Ecosia, but it’s just based on feelings, so it doesn’t even make sense to share it. Apologies for not answering your question.
Instead I would like to focus on this point:
Ecosia isn’t very private, since it sends data to Bing
Also DuckDuckGo does this, but they aggregate and anonymize that data before forwarding it to Bing. That’s probably the best they can do without building their own first-party infrastructure. I would imagine Ecosia does the same.
no, ddg uses bing’s searches plus its own little index, but you never touch bings server, ddg does it for you, data being sent to bing comes from their servers not your pc
i think ddg purportedly doesnt collect users data when they connect to ddg’s servers. im completely unaware of how ecosia handles any of this since it always felt like greenwashing to steal users data but im going by feels now i never did much investigation
implementations of these seem to have shorter lifespans than the collective american attention span; my firefox bookmarks library has become a graveyard of the ones i used for a couple of weeks/months before they inevitably go offline.
I’ve been using it for about a year. I’m not sure if privacy is really a problem. It might depend on your search phrase. I don’t think Bing/MS can identify you that easily when searching with Ecosia.
It works well for me most of the time, though. I barely need to use Google.
Things will really get exciting once they have their own index.
I used it until I switched to kagi. It was fine. Search results are better on Kagi and I’m not giving any information to Microsoft, but planting trees is nice.
Isn’t Kagi pretty expensive though? When I tested it vs Brave and DDG, I was basically unimpressed to the point where anything more than a buck a month seems out of line. (I can’t even remember what they actually wanted, just that it seemed like a lot more than that.)
I mean, running a search engine is one of the most expensive things you can do, so the fact it’s so cheap is honestly astounding.
Did you actually use many of the features? Like pinning certain websites, blocking or deranking others, setting up shortcuts like !w, etc? Also kagi has provably private searches, so you can make web searches without anyone retaining a log of what you’re doing, which no other search provider can do, much less tries to do.
So no, I don’t use a lot of those features. But having to go to $10/mo for unlimited searches is laughable pricing, IMHO. Even $5 for 300 searches is ridiculous. That’s basically a week of searches?
I respect the idea of it, but my feeling is that they will never grow the business past a very niche offering if that is how they’re going to price it. And I say that as a very privacy oriented person.
You should try measuring your searches. I also thought I used a ton of searches, as a software dev I search a lot. When I first switched I was sure I was going to be using several thousand searches a month. I was barely using more than 300. With Google it was at 800-900.
It’s there since long enough to know that, if privacy was on their roadmap, it would already be there. That’s my point of view, but I haven’t take a look at their stance about it, it might be in the works, I just don’t know.
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I use Ecosia nearly exclusively.
I don’t like it as much as DDG; which has a somewhat better privacy focus, more widgets, and better support for “bangs”.
But the bangs I really care about are still there, it’s European and working on a European search index along with Quant, and the trees are pretty cool too.
As is it still relies on either Bing or Google for the results, but oh well. So does basically every alternative search engine, and I’d rather go through Ecosia than directly through those two.
There is also an Metasearch engine which, like Ecosia, create search revenues to support several charity projects (Environment, Education, Medical Support), Max-Impact (FOSS)
https://llarryyllarryy.github.io/Max-Impact-Search/
interesting, i didn’t knew about Max-impact
It works for me.
I do have an opinion about Ecosia, but it’s just based on feelings, so it doesn’t even make sense to share it. Apologies for not answering your question.
Instead I would like to focus on this point:
Also DuckDuckGo does this, but they aggregate and anonymize that data before forwarding it to Bing. That’s probably the best they can do without building their own first-party infrastructure. I would imagine Ecosia does the same.
no, ddg uses bing’s searches plus its own little index, but you never touch bings server, ddg does it for you, data being sent to bing comes from their servers not your pc
Sure, that’s what I thought. And Ecosia doesn’t do the same?
i think ddg purportedly doesnt collect users data when they connect to ddg’s servers. im completely unaware of how ecosia handles any of this since it always felt like greenwashing to steal users data but im going by feels now i never did much investigation
me gusta https://github.com/searxng/searxng
implementations of these seem to have shorter lifespans than the collective american attention span; my firefox bookmarks library has become a graveyard of the ones i used for a couple of weeks/months before they inevitably go offline.
Make your own instance.
What’s the point of hosting your own searx instance? You’re still pinging Google, Bing, etc
If OPs bookmarks are all going dark and OP uses them, then OP could just do the work themselve and not have to worry about instamces going dark.
I did and deepseek outlasted it. Lol
I use Ecosia daily. Obviously, it isn’t private but I believe that is worth the sacrifice especially since they’re legitimately planting trees.
I like trees so I use it.
I’ve been using it for about a year. I’m not sure if privacy is really a problem. It might depend on your search phrase. I don’t think Bing/MS can identify you that easily when searching with Ecosia.
It works well for me most of the time, though. I barely need to use Google.
Things will really get exciting once they have their own index.
I used it until I switched to kagi. It was fine. Search results are better on Kagi and I’m not giving any information to Microsoft, but planting trees is nice.
Isn’t Kagi pretty expensive though? When I tested it vs Brave and DDG, I was basically unimpressed to the point where anything more than a buck a month seems out of line. (I can’t even remember what they actually wanted, just that it seemed like a lot more than that.)
I mean, running a search engine is one of the most expensive things you can do, so the fact it’s so cheap is honestly astounding.
Did you actually use many of the features? Like pinning certain websites, blocking or deranking others, setting up shortcuts like !w, etc? Also kagi has provably private searches, so you can make web searches without anyone retaining a log of what you’re doing, which no other search provider can do, much less tries to do.
So no, I don’t use a lot of those features. But having to go to $10/mo for unlimited searches is laughable pricing, IMHO. Even $5 for 300 searches is ridiculous. That’s basically a week of searches?
I respect the idea of it, but my feeling is that they will never grow the business past a very niche offering if that is how they’re going to price it. And I say that as a very privacy oriented person.
You should try measuring your searches. I also thought I used a ton of searches, as a software dev I search a lot. When I first switched I was sure I was going to be using several thousand searches a month. I was barely using more than 300. With Google it was at 800-900.
Probably depends on the person.
It’s there since long enough to know that, if privacy was on their roadmap, it would already be there. That’s my point of view, but I haven’t take a look at their stance about it, it might be in the works, I just don’t know.
Ecosia is better than using big tech directly, that’s for sure. But ofc it’s not private.
The money for the trees comes from something, but at least it’s used for something nice.
To care more about the environment than privacy is a fair choice.