Ecosia (Search)

★★★☆☆

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

★★★☆☆

When I started seriously evaluating using Ecosia in early 2025, the quality of its search results was comparable to DuckDuckGo. Which is to say: at least it was 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 don’t track your search history unless you actively opt into personalized results.

Also like DDG, they’re working on their own search index to reduce dependence on the big two. It’s still more private than searching Google or Bing directly, but it’s not their focus: Ecosia is more interested in minimizing and counteracting the environmental costs of the internet.

Unfortunately, as of October, Ecosia’s results have gotten noticeably worse. I had been using it on my work system to avoid using up my Kagi subscription on work-related queries, but it’s not finding stuff as well as it used to. And then there are the sponsored results for propaganda sites that I can’t even report to Ecosia because they’re getting it secondhand from Google. I’ve switched over to DuckDuckGo for now, but I’m considering finding out how much more I end up using Kagi when I use it for both home and work.

So I’ve stopped using it, and lowered my rating from 4 stars to 3 for search and overall.

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 don’t, there’s 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 doesn’t seem to add much else compared to the basic browser, and there doesn’t seem to be any sync functionality (though Floccus works for bookmarks). But at least it doesn’t add a bunch of stuff I don’t want like Opera, Brave or Edge, and it’s ahead of Ungoogled Chromium in completeness and installing/updating.

I do appreciate that I can turn off embeds like the “Log in with Google” prompts that plague websites these days. (OK, I can log in with Google, but if I don’t want to – especially if I already have a login on this site – the pop-up is useless and annoying.)

It’s 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 can’t do that in Chrome either. I’d rather use Vivaldi or Firefox (or one of its derivatives) with Ecosia as the default search engine.