New Ecosia search features!
New Ecosia search features!
We're always working on improving your search experience and helping you have a bigger impact with Ecosia. Here's what's new.
I'm personally very excited to see new features continue to roll out for Ecosia! What do you guys think?
TLDR:
Ecosia is rolling out optional Google-based search results in Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and the Philippines. If you choose to opt-in you should get more accurate search results and ads
The Green Leaf Icon (the little leaf next to environmentally-friendly companies and the little smoggy factory next to environmentally-harmful ones) has been expanded to encompass more companies
New Rich Search Features: Now you can book a train, see attractions, book hotels, and convert currency right within your search!
Ecosia AI Chat: Ecosia has released a beta for a green chatbot (probably a large language model not technically AI but still)
Come check out !ecosia@mander.xyz for more Ecosia stuff!
Is this astroturfing
Feels like it for sure. Kinda odd for a site that's about saving the planet to want to include an LLM driven chat bot since those take lots of power to run. It's also not every day I see someone on Lemmy be excited for the inclusion of a Google product.
I'm not associated with Ecosia in any way, I just really like the work they're doing to make the planet better. For the Google Index feature, I'm personally not going to turn it on since I care about privacy (and Bing's index is nearly as good); I'm exited that they're adding features but also happy that they made it optional for people like me who care more about privacy.
For the LLM energy part, Ecosia runs their own solar farms and generates 200% of the power they use with those solar farms (read this blog post if you want to learn more).
Thanks, nice to know. Also subbed to !ecosia@mander.xyz, didn't know that exists.
Yeah I made the community after noticing there wasn't one, so it's somewhat new
Google's data part of it is completely optional (it is only if you enable Google's index, which is currently in the beta phase and only available in select regions), and Microsoft's data part is "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." I'm pretty sure Duckduckgo has something similar with Microsoft too (could be wrong, just thought I remembered reading something about it). Using Searx or some other heavily-privacy focused search engine would probably give you somewhat better privacy, but I personally find Ecosia's privacy good enough since they do seem to put forth as much effort as possible given their contract and their privacy policy isn't bad (it's way better than Google's). They also plant trees/environmental conservation with the money and are a nonprofit, which are both things important to me.
If you don't feel comfortable using Ecosia that's fine, but in my opinion the privacy policy isn't too bad, most other engines have similar policies (or worse), and they try to do the right thing with what you give them