Originally published at: Switch your search engine for your efficiency, for the health of the web, and for the planet | Boing Boing
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Checks out. They are even planting trees in the middle of this post!
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I want to try before I ‘buy’ but I can’t find a link to the search engine.
What’s going on here?
Ya, this is totally uninteresting if it can’t be accessed with just a browser.
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And under the hood, it’s Bing. So Microsoft is getting the money, FWIW.
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I am not using the extension myself but I was able to add it to my browser as the default search engine easily. At least gonna kick the tires on it.
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Don’t use browser extensions until they are already mature and trusted by millions.
A bad extension can change web page content, insert unwanted ads, and capture personal data.
Set your browser’s default search engine to this or whatever, you have way more control of that.
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My inner 14 yr old niece says: “sus”.
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If you want to try the search on its own, just go to their website here:
(Other search engines are available)
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What is there other than Google that under the hood isn’t Bing?
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Yahoo?
DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha,Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google
– as per Wikipedia
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Oh interesting, thanks. For some reason I thought ddg.gg (which I use) was all Bing under the covers. Maybe it used to be, or maybe I was always misinformed.
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I’m not convinced yet, though if you’d like to switch you don’t need an extension. (in chrome, at least) Go to their website (ecosia.org) and then open the search settings and it should magically be one of the available choices.
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…or if you have the means (a small VPS is fine) then host your own (Welcome to searx — Searx Documentation (Searx-1.0.0.tex)) so you can control what’s behind it.
The idea that we should be somehow monogamous-ish with search engines is kind of odd. The single greatest reason (and there are many others) I find Firefox indispensable for browsing is the all-the-search-engines field (specifically separate from the address bar - (aka googles or whichever tech-giant controls the browsers way of dark-patterning all your interests through its all-seeing-eye)). It’s a built in feature (used to be on by default) but now needs to be brought out in settings.This thing enables direct query submissions into amazon, google, wikipedia,discogs duckduckgo, bbs, you-name-it you-can-probably-add-it as an engine. Recently set DDG as default - (because big-G doesn’t need to know everything about me), but can quickly switch between constantly on-the-fly.
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Bring back AltaVista!
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Excite!
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I remember that one and I didn’t even need to Ask Jeeves.
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As a similar point of thought, it’s also nice to try alternative/homebrew web browsers.
These sorts of browsers can be text-only and configured to accept no executable code or cookies. Mocha Text Browser is one of these for a phone. It takes an adjustment to how little you actually see on each page, but the text content stays untouched. So if you’re using the web to read up on something it’s truly awesome. Using browsers like this can be amazing as a reminder of how malicious web browsing has become compared to its very thrilling mind-expanding roots. It’s greener, too, if that’s a motivator.
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