Unfortunately, there are no Canadian owned and operated search engines (they were all acquired by Americans! Yes really). The next best alternative is Ecosia, which is the only major search engine that actually invests to Canadians’ benefit. Ecosia partners with Tree Canada to regenerate Canadian forests.

In Canada, Ecosia’s reforestation project is located within the Acadian Forest and focuses on restoring its historic diversity in areas that have been degraded by centuries of intensive land use.

Video playlist: How Ecosia works.

Ecosia is also B Corp Certified. This means they have changed their by-laws to be mission locked, and are required to consider stakeholders’ interests such as employees, customers, and the environment.

Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that plants and protects trees. By dedicating 100% of its profits to the planet, Ecosia has planted over 214,229,374 million trees since its founding in December 2009. In addition to trees, Ecosia invests in environmental and social initiatives like regenerative agriculture, renewable energy and community-driven climate projects.

Getting Started

Manual configuration (advanced)

Using Mozilla Firefox:

  • Search string URL: https://www.ecosia.org/search?addon=Firefox&q=%s
  • Search suggestion API: https://ac.ecosia.org/autocomplete?type=list&q=%s
  • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
    2·
    2 hours ago

    How do they profit? I’m allergic to advertising, and I happily pay for Kagi to be able to control what I see and how my search results are displayed.

    • AlolanVulpix@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      See the video playlist: How Ecosia works.

      For myself, I think the community benefit is more important than the “cost” of seeing ads. Perhaps in the future, as Ecosia grows, they’ll be able to offer paid ad free plans.

      • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
        2·
        2 hours ago

        As someone with ADHD, an ad-blocker is not a want, it’s a need, so I’d be using Ecosia with an ad-blocker, which defeats the purpose.

  • jayk@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    11 hours ago

    Alternatively, you can use a self hosted searxng instance, or try and find a local instance here: https://searx.space/ There’s sadly no trees that are planted with this method though

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
      1·
      5 hours ago

      My problem is that it’s just an aggregate, if I could self host a crawler that just indexes sites I want then that would be infinitely more valuable