Ecosia (Search)
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Ecosia is a non-profit search provider that uses renewable energy to power their servers and partners with local environmental organizations, most visibly (but not only) to plant trees. Ethical Consumer rates it 11, but notes that it depends on the lower-rated Google and Microsoft.
Search Engine
The quality of Ecosiaās search results seems comparable to DuckDuckGo. Which is to say: at least itās better than Google Search since Google started prioritizing keeping you on its site over sending you where you want. Both add a layer on top of Bing, Google, and specialized site results (ex: pulling travel info from TripAdvisor), remixing them with their own priorities. Not surprisingly, for Ecosia this includes things like climate assessment and ecology. They donāt track your search history unless you actively opt into personalized results.
Also like DDG, theyāre working on their own search index to reduce dependence on the big two. Itās still more private than searching Google or Bing directly, but itās not their focus: Ecosia is more interested in minimizing and counteracting the environmental costs of the internet.
Using Ecosia by Default
Some web browsers already have Ecosia in their list of search engines, so you just have to choose it. For those that donāt, thereās a Chromium/Firefox extension to add it, or you can add it manually using this URL in your search settings:
https://www.ecosia.org/search?method=index&q=%s
Desktop Web Browser
Another Chromium skin. It doesnāt seem to add much else compared to the basic browser, and there doesnāt seem to be any sync functionality (though Floccus works for bookmarks). But at least it doesnāt add a bunch of stuff I donāt want like Opera, Brave or Edge, and itās ahead of Ungoogled Chromium in completeness and installing/updating.
I do appreciate that I can turn off embeds like the āLog in with Googleā prompts that plague websites these days. (OK, I can log in with Google, but if I donāt want to ā especially if I already have a login on this site ā the pop-up is useless and annoying.)
Itās only on Windows and macOS, and has the usual KeePassXC hoops to jump through.
Mobile App
Stripped-down Chromium with an ad blocker. No option to move the toolbar down to the bottom where I can actually reach it with my thumb, but then I canāt do that in Chrome either. Iād rather use Vivaldi or Firefox (or one of its derivatives) with Ecosia as the default search engine.
More info at Ecosia (Search).