From September 2023, we will be gradually rolling out our new unique search offer. This will happen over several months and won’t apply to everyone at the same time. This means that when you search through Ecosia, we work with either Microsoft Bing or, with your consent, Google to provide you with search results and ads. In order to do this, we automatically collect data required by search partners to prevent bot attacks and ad fraud - which includes your IP address and search terms.
For a growing number of users we can now provide Google results and advertisements. In order to supply these results and ads, Google requires a cookie to be set on your browser and access to your device’s local storage to store information. We will ask for your consent before doing this and if you do not agree, we will provide non-personalized results from Microsoft Bing.
In order to provide non-personalized Microsoft Bing results and ads, we are contractually obliged to implement Microsoft Clarity to capture how you use and interact with our website through behavioral metrics, as well as sharing your IP address and search terms. This behavioral data is captured in individual search sessions and is not tied to a user profile unless you consent. The processing of this data is necessary for the provision of our service. Although Ecosia does not use this information, it is used by Microsoft Bing for site and advertising optimization, as well as fraud protection. For more information about how Microsoft collects and uses your data, visit Microsoft’s privacy statement and Microsoft Clarity documentation.
Microsoft Bing does also offer personalized search results and ads. This service requires a cookie to be set on your browser which creates a personal profile. We will ask for your consent before enabling this and you can change your choice at any time in your cookie preferences. More information on cookies and how to take control of your preferences can be found in the “What about cookies?” section.
Good way to lose the customer base.
When it comes to the environment they have no competition. I’m still with them.
If you look at it from another perspetive, someone like kagi takes a lot of pride in being lightweight in resource usage. I wonder if that has a comparable result on the environment
Comparable to planting 180 million trees? Plus, Ecosia’s servers run on renewable energy
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds to me like they don’t really have another option at the moment, and its Bing who is responsible for most of the changes.
Kagi uses its own crawler, right? But yeah, I expect DDG to follow Ecosia’s lead.
Well I guess it’s kind of a lose lose then
I used it as my primary browser on my laptop/desktop. I supported the cause and through my usage I planted +150 trees, but the trade-off is steepening so I’m going to have to jump ship.
I’ll be pivoting to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, and use Brave for more nuanced/specific results.
Wooof. I’ve started using Brave for less then 24 hours and I’m already jumping ship. Anyone backed by Peter Thiel is an immediate ‘no’ for me.
I’ll have to try Whoogle or SearXNG but search engines seem to regularly block my queries so that I only get random results from wikimedia. Maybe I can resolve the issues w/ self-hosting? Otherwise, I might just try to redirect most of my questions to open-source LLMs
https://svmetasearch.eu.org/s/search
I use this one
I selfhost SearXNG via Unraid and have it plugged in as my default search engine in Firefox. Occasionally there might be an issue with one of the providers but I’ve found there’s usually an update pending that I just need to run which fixes the problem. I haven’t heard anything negative from my users as of yet though.
I strongly advocate for Kagi. Yes, it’s paid search, but it means that there is no tracking or ad revenue concerns obfuscating the search results.
And DDG while you’re at it. At least if you wanna be concerned about CEOs.
With DuckDuckGo we get zero trees planted. It’s outside the EU too so although they have a relationship with US companies I hope that there are some protections around data transfer.
I don’t think so. They have commercial agreements with Microsoft that forces them to not block their trackers, so who knows what else they are obliged to by contract
For non-search tracker blocking (eg in our browser), we block most third-party trackers. Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon.
A browser isn’t a search engine A browser isn’t a search engine A browser isn’t a search engine A browser isn’t a search engine A browser isn’t a search engine A browser isn’t a search engine A browser isn’t a search engine A browser isn’t a search engine
Tell us that you know absolutely nothing about Brave without saying that you know absolutely nothing about Brave
above
look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search look up Brave search
Say what you want about Brave, but at least they are moving to their own indexing. Where as DuckDuckGo is just Bing…
Also I’d take that anti-Brave link with a grain of salt. I’ve got a hunch it’s somehow connected back to a Vivaldi dev. So I’d view it as highly untrustworthy.
You might want to inform yourself whether tree NFTs actually achieve anything useful in the real world.
The questionable privacy policy doesn’t negate the actual work being done. I’m no longer using them, but calling it tree NFTs is misguided
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/pPg_vDMeiJY?si=pmeBAG7HDXhmAOgV&t=73
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
It sounds like they don’t really have a choice in this unless they completely switch up their internal search engines, right? Like, it’s a shame, but not exactly something they’re to blame for? Or am I missing something?
No, it appears you are correct. Looks like they’re being bullied by Google and Microsoft.
I only use Ecosia as my search engine at work, so I’m not too concerned since I’ve got bigger fish to fry at work, such as Zoom and Google Drive.
I am not blaming them as much as I am reevaluating the level of privacy I’m sacrificing given the additional context in their updated statement
- ‘Their’ privacy policy now roughly equates to “We don’t really do anything but you should read the privacy policy of Microsoft (and optionally Google).” It feels less like an alternative search engine and more like a middle-man that still passes the data along. Speaking of which:
- Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but they are touting ‘non-personalized results and ads’ as if that’s the privacy end goal, when it’s really just the side-effect of companies not having data on you. Based on their updated policy, they are giving the illusion of privacy via ‘non-personalized results’ while capturing/sharing searches, behaviors & IP address that I’m guessing can easily be deanonymized @ Microsoft.
Maybe I’m misreading something? It reads like the same experience of using Bing without the marginal benefit of a personalized experience.
I think it’s a catch-22 because I’d imagine a sizeable cohort of their pro-environment demographic is likely pro-privacy/anti-‘corporations knowing everything about you’, and so while the increase in usefulness in data can increase their charitable donations, it will rub lots of users the wrong way.
Isn’t the new part just the google stuff? They have always been using bing results.
Wayback Machine ftw. Here is August 2023:
The only piece of personal information we collect is the IP address your internet connection runs over at a given moment. Why? We need to protect ourselves against “spammers”, meaning ad fraud and bots trying to up-rank certain search results. Your IP address is anonymised after one week or less. For example, 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX.
We still use Microsoft Bing to deliver search results, but using them through Ecosia is very different from searching on Bing directly. At Microsoft or Google, you are likely to have personal IDs which track you across all of their services: email, calendar, video platform, gaming, video conferencing, maps, locations, location history, and so on.
We don’t sell any data to anyone and we don’t buy any data either.
We are interested in the performance of our social media advertising, as well as answering your search results. We would like to know if users stay with us once they have seen our ads and installed us. This helps us run the right advertising campaigns on the right platforms. We never let those platforms know your search terms, though. We only share whether you are still searching with us or not. We only do so with your consent and you can remove that consent at any time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230729030327/https://www.ecosia.org/privacy
