Offer Ecosia as a search engine option

Ecosia is like DuckDuckGo with regard to privacy but all profits are used to plant trees (45.7 million so far). This makes it very appealing to eco-friendly web users. It also uses Bing rather than Google, which makes it appealing to people who are trying to avoid the latter.

I was able to add it to Brave via their Chrome extension. However, having it as one of the built-in options might help make Brave more attractive to eco-friendly and/or anti-Google users.

Although Brave strips out adverts, which is theoretically going to affect the business model of search engines, Ecosia accepts use of ad blockers as they still generate income based on overall number of users. That said, I have allowed adverts and it seems to be working fine on Brave.

ECOSIA PRIVACY POLICY
We only collect the data we absolutely need and do so with a self-hosted, secure and encrypted in-house analytics system.

We do not, and never will, share or sell any data we collect ourselves with any third party. Also, no third party that is not directly involved in answering your search request will ever have access to your search data.

For all data we collect ourselves, we take data protection very seriously and take many steps to ensure it is safe and anonymous. For example:

  • We remove parts of the IP address when we store it so they become anonymous. For example 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX
  • We do not use unique event fingerprinting
  • We send all data collected from Ecosia services over an SSL-secured connection
  • We store all analytics data in an highly encrypted database
  • We only keep fully anonymised search data after 7 days

If you have “Do Not Track” enabled in your browser settings we do not collect any analytics data. Most other websites ignore this setting - we think users should have a choice.

We only allow connections to our search engine over a secured SSL/HTTPS connection. This way no one between you and Ecosia can secretly listen in on your searches. We use Digicert, one of the largest and most trusted SSL certificate authorities, to generate and manage our SSL certificates.

Ecosia’s servers are located around the world in order to provide a fast response no matter where you are. However, when you perform a search on Ecosia, your request will generally be routed to the server that is geographically nearest to you. That means, for example, if you are located in Germany your search traffic will remain within Germany and will fall under strict German privacy regulations.

6 Likes

I support this as a long time Ecosia user. It’s a good engine all around. I also use DuckDuckGo, and between the two of them I don’t need any other.

2 Likes

Hi @seanmcd @Joel60,
Ecosia is already listed as search engine option for Brave on desktop and mobile.

EDIT:
To manage your default search engine on desktop https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017479752-How-do-I-set-my-default-search-engine-

Thanks
:slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes

Even though I don’t use ecosia, I agree. No harm done adding it.

I have been using Brave on other computers and the ecosia option was there. Today I changed computer, fresh installed Brave and the ecosia option was gone :frowning:

Hi @filipematos,
The team just clean up the search engine list. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/3316

You can add Ecosia on your own https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017479752-How-do-I-set-my-default-search-engine-

Thanks
:slightly_smiling_face:

Hey eljuno,
Thanks for your reply. However when I add it I can’t set it as my default just use it with a keyword.

Hey Brave Team,
Many would still love to see this on the default list of options in iOS. Ecosia is many people’s default elsewhere and it supports a great cause.

A lot of people want to use Ecosia as their standart search engine.
Please put it on the default list for brave.

1 Like

i second that.
interested may want to read my other suggestions for including a co2-footprint stat into brave.

1 Like

I also think you should add ecosia as one of the defaults. It’s a good cause, and manually adding ecosia is not straightforward for average users. Once you have to fill in an address it’s already too much. I really think it should be the default engine, but being available in the list would already be something.

Hi, I’ve read the “How do I set my default search engine” and followed the instructions for ecosia. Hoewever, it’s not letting me set ecosia as a default search engine. Every other website in the search engine list allows me to “make default” except for ecosia. How can I make ecosia my default search engine for the search bar?

install this official extension and you must be good to go

Thank you, I eventually stumbled upon it and tried it. But I use momentum as an extension and like it and Ecosia and momentum conflict each other for opening in a new tab. When turning off ecosia then the browser doesn’t retain Ecosia as the default search engine for task bar searches.

Edit (September 25th, 2020):
It’s working now, I had to figure out the correct link that enables search queries, so I guessed a few times and eventually got it.