Ecosia Is Now a Default Search Engine Option for Safari

Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider:

Ecosia is a search engine that promotes privacy first and plants trees around the world, and with Mondays updates, it is now available as a default search engine setting on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Ecosia uses their income from search ads to fund planting trees around the world in harsh environments. The search engine doesn’t track users, encrypts searches, and anonymizes data within a week of it being created. The ad revenue generated from Apple users alone have planted over seven million trees in 2020, and now you can do more by making it the default search engine. The website shows over 115 million trees have been planted as a result of search revenue so far.

I’ve lost track of how many years ago I switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo. I suspect a lot of you have never even tried switching away from Google for default search, just out of inertia, and perhaps a general sense that whatever Google’s faults, any other web search probably just plain sucks.

I wouldn’t hesitate to switch back to Google for default search if using DuckDuckGo sucked. Your mileage, of course, may vary, but the key is that however profound it may sound to change your default search engine, it’s actually one of the very easiest technical changes you can make in your computing life. It takes 30 seconds to switch and 30 seconds to switch back if you decide you don’t like it.

I actually hadn’t heard of Ecosia before, but their story is interesting enough that I’m giving them a shot. It’s so easy to switch.

★ Monday, 14 December 2020