I use ecosia as my default search engine! It's pretty great, and it respects privacy. It even tells you roughly how many trees have been planted from your searches.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
412 points (96.2% liked)
You Should Know
33190 readers
42 users here now
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Wait… how does that work?
If our searches fund trees, then our searches have to be making them money… and I’m not aware of many advertisers that respect privacy.
They show you ads based on your search terms, not based on trackers or digital profiles of you.
I could be convinced that the search engine itself isn’t profiling me.
But if by virtue of loading the ad, the advertiser gains my IP address, MAC address, and a fingerprint based on things like my installed fonts, then that’s not really privacy in any meaningful sense.
It’s just a couple links at the top. It doesn’t load in any custom HTML/JS or iframe afaik.
Okay, if that’s the case then that is a perfectly reasonable implementation.
MAC address
nope
They sell your feet pics to degenerates
Me too! How many trees have you planted?
66 is recorded currently in my ecosia account, but I used to have well over a hundred on an old PC before I ever realized you could sign in to track across devices. I probably have a ton on my work PC that isn't tracked to my account either.
I just learned you can create an account to track this! I am always a bit sad to see my progress being lost on cookie refreshes or whatever happens. Will change this as soon as possible. Thanks for highlighting that!
Thats great! How long have you been using Ecosia? I just wanna compare with my stats, since I have 1.4k
giving all your data for the love of trees, now thats dedication!
Their privacy policy is pretty good and good enough for me, and it's leagues ahead of Bing and Google's. Also, it's just for tracking trees, which isn't hard to do privately
mmmkay.. remember google used to say.. dont be evil, now they have literally put DRM in their browser so ensure they are serving you ads.
Well that's because they went public and expanded and all that jazz; Ecosia is a certified B-Corp and nonprofit and an owner sold their shares to the Purpose Foundation so they can't sell Ecosia.
I made the switch to Ecosia because it's basically the same as DDG but it gives me the option of going to Google Maps as a link, rather than always having to type the !g tag.
Yeah, and it also has the feature where if you want to search something on google just put #g in the search and it auto redirects to google like bangs!
Yeah both DDG and Ecosia have the shortcuts, what annoyed me with DDG was that if you searched for something then clicked a Map result it took you into Apple Maps, which was crap. With Ecosia when you click Maps it just gives you a choice between Google and Bing - with DDG I'd always click the link and then have to go back and type in the bang.
Oh I didn't even know that!
I dunno, I used to use ecosia and eventually switched back to Google because ecosia kept giving me bad or irrelevant search results compared to Google. That was a couple years ago, is it worth it giving it another try?
Both Ecosia and DDG use Bing for their back end. I still find myself throwing in a !g occassionally when I don't like the results, but frankly Google has gone down hill and isn't much better a lot of the time.
I guess they’re announcing it in advance so that if anyone objects to funding humans instead of trees (as someone surely will) then they’ll be free to not use Ecosia on that day.
Well that, it shows they are doing good things and they care, and it functions as an incentive for people to use Ecosia or convince others to join like this post here does
True but it does look like planting trees has been their entire thing up until now. Maybe they’ve done 1-time things like this before, I dunno.
Does anyone have recommendations on good places to donate more directly?
Here is the official website of treasury: https://www.tgr.gov.ma/wps/portal/donsenligneseisme2023
The amount is in Morrocan Dirham which is roughly 0.1$
No idea from me...
The last I heard is that they're recieving aid from 4 countries, and haven't responded to other offers of help just yet
Can someone please explain how to move to ecosia on an Android mobile device, but in tech-stupid-ese?
Install the official app - it's the easiest way
There's an app! Good to know!
Go to settings and search engine, and if there is an option to add a custom search engine put this in https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=%s otherwise you would either have to already have it as an option like on brave or just download the Ecosia app. Chromium doesn't seem to by default allow custom search engines, so a lot of chromium browsers will probably not have it.
I think you should probably instead know that it's better to just donate directly to the aid agencies actually supplying the aid instead of letting a non-aid entity charity-wash themselves to get more money later.
Well, first off, you don't donate to them, you use their service and they donate the revenue. Second, Ecosia is a non-profit and a certified B-Corperation. Third, they aren't charity-washing, all the advertising they did was this short blog post.
Helping earthquake victims based on their news coverage is a little questionable, when you advertise with investing in sustainability.
Where did you read that funds are based entirely off that specific earthquake news coverage?
What do you mean?
While it can be somewhat cynical to play out environmental vs social issues, I agree with the scepticism here.