Switching your search engine
Make the choice to upgrade from Google.
There are many good reasons to do so, and few downsides.
Do it for your efficiency, for the health of the web and for the planet too.
First, a quick clarification because this is confusing to many people: The thing you use to browse the internet is not a search engine. Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Safari–these are web browsers. A browser is software that allows you to look at any web page–and these companies often make money by selling your attention to the search engine that bids the most. Apple takes billions of dollars a year from Google in exchange for steering you to their search engine.
And the reason that Google bids so much is that they make an insane amount of money. Billions of dollars a year from serving up ads and harvesting your data from your searches. That money needs to come from somewhere.
You can switch your search engine in just a few clicks. See a short video and find the links right here.
Here’s what will happen when you switch to Ecosia:
You’ll get faster and less cluttered search results, with far fewer ads.You’ll be diversifying the web, so SEO hacks can’t easily take over. Here’s Adam Savage ranting about this.You’ll be giving away far less data about yourself and maintaining more privacy.AND! You’ll be planting trees through a certified not-for-profit B corp… more than 100,000,000 planted so far.
If you don’t like the results, you can switch back in two minutes.
Faster, free, and more convenient.
If you switch and then you forward this to five more people who switch, we’re likely to plant another 100,000,000 trees in the next year. That’s a lot. If you switch and spread the word, search results will get better and Google will start to do a better job knowing that they don’t have quite the same scale of monopoly.
If you switch, we all come out ahead. Share a question or experience here and I’ll share in a future post. PS I wasn’t asked to post this or compensated to do so. I switched 9 months ago and I’m glad I did.