Ecosia and other fund-raising search engines

[enjay]

I'd like to pick the hive mind on this. One of our students has written (quite eloquently and passionately) to our Headteacher asking us to change from Google search to Ecosia, which allegedly plants a tree for every 45 searches made. What are your thoughts on these fund-raising search engines? Are the results as good/accurate/relevant/up-to-date/educationally-appropriate as Google? Is the safe-search result and especially image filtering as good as Google? I did a few searches for slightly emotive or contentious terms and Ecosia's results weren't NSFW but were certainly slightly less sanitised than Google's (except an image search for "kiss", where Ecosia mostly showed me photos of the 80s rock group!).

 

Also, are they actually as good as they claim? I am dubious as to how they can raise the kind of money they claim just from searches. Google's money comes from sponsored results and from the commercial value of datamining and profiling me. Ecosia doesn't seem to have nearly as much of those, yet seems to make more money (that or it is MUCH cheaper than I'm imagining to plant a tree). I guess even if they can only do 1/10th of what they claim, it is better than nothing and might encourage our students to make other simple changes for the greater good.

 

So, are there reasons I should or shouldn't make the switch?

 

Thanks everyone!

[localzuk]

Search is actually just advertising. Ecosia get paid advertising fees when you search and see ads in the results. They then use a chunk of their profits to plant trees. https://cariki.co.uk/blogs/the-green-road/is-ecosia-legit-or-fake

 

I believe Ecosia uses Bing underneath, so I think the safe search stuff involved is the same between the 2? Not 100% sure though - testing may be needed.

Edited April 21, 2021 by localzuk

[dhicks]

So, are there reasons I should or shouldn't make the switch?

 

I don't think there was any way to force safe search in the same way that you can for Google or Bing on some filtering packages (filtering package basically addes "safesearch=true" to each Google search request it sees go past), so some keywords could turn up some questionable results.

[jemal]

That's a coincidence! I had a student also ask for Ecosia to be allowed to be their search engine earlier this week. Guessing there's a campaign going on or something. Reluctantly had to say 'no', but it was really nice to see a request for something good, rather than the usual "please let me play on the cool maths site".

[Meldrew]

I've had to refuse it on safeguarding grounds, but was really disappointed that I couldn't do it - would have been great PR.

 

Meldrew.

[dhicks]

Guessing there's a campaign going on or something.

 

I've seen Ecosia's advertising on a couple of "six-sheet" posters at bus stops and similar. They could maybe do with someone checking their search engine hits requirements for use in schools - forced safe search support (just support for "safesearch=true" to be inserted into all queries, as above, but they'd need to make sure support was there for common filtering solutions used in schools). Might be worth emailing their support, if available, to check if that's possible.

[enjay]

Taking what @localzuk said, I tried some searches on Ecosia and Bing and, if I set safe search to "strict" rather than the default "moderate", I seem to get the same results on both searches when using tame search terms, but Bing seems to be more filtered on the emotive words.

 

So, now I'm leaning towards advising the Headteacher to deny the request, I'm wondering if I should actually be blocking the site!