Search the Web, Plant a Tree, and Get Some Extra Privacy

By | October 12, 2020
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Search the Web, Plant a Tree, and Get Some Extra Privacy

Cloudeight Site Pick - Ecosia - Search the Web and plant a tree

We just found a search engine that provides you with as much security and privacy as DuckDuckGo but goes a step beyond. When you search using Ecosia, you not only enhance your search privacy, you also plant trees. And who doesn’t love trees?

Well, you don’t plant the trees, Ecosia does — and they have reports to prove it. As of the day we discovered them, Ecosia had planted over 110 million trees. Even if you’re not a tree hugger, you have to admit that’s a heck of a lot of trees. And a lot of oxygen added to the atmosphere so we can breathe, not to mention the reducing CO2 levels.

You can easily add Ecosia to Chrome, Edge, and Firefox by visiting https://www.ecosia.org/ with your favorite browser and clicking…

Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox

But be careful… once you do this, your default search engine in your will be changed to Ecosia, but you can always change it back to Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or whatever you like.

So, we suggest that you try Ecosia before you click the “Add to (name of your browser)” that you go to the https://www.ecosia.org page and type your search query in the search box. Try it out first and see if you like it. If you do, then you can click on the “Add to (name of your browser)” button.

We found the search results to be as good as (nearly the same as) DuckDuckGo, but not as good as Google. You must choose between efficacy and privacy, I guess.

Here’s the scoop on Ecosia from its developers:

Make Ecosia your new search engine and plant trees with your searches – for free!

We stand for a better internet

Completely transparent
We publish our monthly financial reports, so you see exactly where the income from your searches goes.

More than CO2 neutral
Our servers run on 200% renewable energy, and every search request removes 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Privacy friendly
We don’t sell your data to advertisers, have no third party trackers and anonymize all searches within one week.

We don’t store your searches permanently
We don’t create personal profiles of you based on your search history. We actually anonymize all searches within one week.

We don’t sell your data to advertisers
Many web services collect user data in order to sell it without asking your permission. We don’t sell your data or your searches to advertising companies.

Your searches are encrypted
We protect your searches from potential eavesdroppers with a securely encrypted connection. This way we make sure that nobody between you and us can see your searches.

We don’t use external tracking tools
Most websites use external tracking tools, like Google Analytics, to optimize their services. We don’t use such third party trackers, in order to prevent others from accessing your searches.
You can turn off all our tracking

We only collect a small amount of data to be able to improve our services. If you want to opt out of tracking, you can activate “Do Not Track” in your browser’s settings.

If search privacy is important to you, give Ecosia a try. It helps keep your searches random and private, and it helps to make the planet we all share, a better place.

Give Ecosia a try by going to https://www.ecosia.org/. If you like it you can easily add it to your browser and make it your browser’s default search engine.

3 thoughts on “Search the Web, Plant a Tree, and Get Some Extra Privacy

  1. Betty Graham

    Hello ,
    Let me say I look forward to all the information you kindly share & this sounds good, just 1 question. What is in it for Ecosia?

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      How does Ecosia make money?
      Like any other search engine, Ecosia earns money from clicks on the advertisements that appear above and beside the search results.

      The advertisements on Ecosia are clearly labeled as Ads and are text links to websites that pay for each click by users. The ads are delivered to you by our partner Bing, who pays Ecosia a share of the revenue generated via these ads.

      Ecosia earns a few cents for every click on an ad from Bing – or a portion of the purchase price made through an affiliate link. Ecosia then gives the profits from this ad revenue to planting projects.

      We also make a small income on commission from our online store. All profits we receive go towards our projects – which means we can plant 20 trees every time we sell a t-shirt… read more on this page.

      Reply
  2. JoninOz

    Hi TC & EB,
    Ecopia administrators are very ambiguous in planting trees and removing CO2 from the atmosphere, CO2 is the gas which trees and plants need in order to survive.

    Reply

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