Is Ecosia a good search engine?

The general feeling is that the act of planting trees and helping the environment makes using Ecosia worthwhile. However, some people don’t find the search experience itself to be rich enough, raising the question of whether it’s a good search engine compared to the likes of Google and Bing.

For example, the TrustPilot reviews of Ecosia are mixed. One user said: “Doesn’t ever give me what I am searching for so I just do random searches in the hope that they will actually plant some trees”.

Another commented: “I like the idea of it but I feel like there isn’t as much information as on Google for example.”

This all reinforces the fact that, while people want to support charity search engines and make the switch from Google, they also still need a good enough search experience to make it worthwhile.

What are the search engine alternatives to Ecosia?

SearchScene is another charitable search engine which is focused on environmental issues and fighting climate change.

We donate to major global charities, including Oxfam, WaterAid, UNICEF and WWF. You can also choose which charities you want to donate to with your searches. So, if you wanted to carry on planting trees like you would with Ecosia, you have the option to select Eden Reforestation Projects as your chosen charity for donations.

The main thing that we believe makes SearchScene a better search engine than Ecosia is that the search experience is superior. We explore this in more detail below.

How does the search experience compare on SearchScene vs Ecsosia?

The thing that sets SearchScene apart from Ecosia is our sophisticated knowledge panels which offer a wealth of information to users on first glance.

For example, when you search for a music artist on SearchScene, you get a much richer search result with far more information. This is more similar to a search engine like Google, compared to Ecosia which doesn’t benefit from a particularly detailed knowledge panel.

Below, you can see the differences when we searched for ‘David Bowie’:

Ecosia:

Ecosia search results for “David Bowie”

SearchScene:

SearchScene search results for “David Bowie”

Both have lots of results that are relevant, but you can see that you get far more information at first glance while using SearchScene.

Whilst with Ecosia, you get web results, a brief Wikipedia overview and some videos, with SearchScene you get a far richer knowledge panel which also includes quick social media and web links, top songs, albums, as well as movies and TV shows. You can also view the top stories about David Bowie.

With SearchScene, it is far easier for the user to find what they are looking for after their first search, rather than having to browse further.

If we take another example, you can see the difference when we search for a popular book like Naomi Klein’s famous non-fiction title, The Shock Doctrine.

Ecosia:

Ecosia search results for Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine”

SearchScene:

SearchScene search results for Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine”

Again, you can see that SearchScene offers far more to the user. Ecosia seems to have a rather templated approach which just includes a snippet from Wikipedia and some videos. On the other hand, SearchScene has a rich knowledge panel with the relevant information for a specific book search. This includes reviews pulled from Goodreads, other books by the same author, and similar books that the user might be interested in.

Another bonus that search engines like Google and Bing have is that they are able to offer autocomplete to easily predict what the searcher is looking for. This is another area where SearchScene appears to be superior to Ecosia if you take a look at the following examples.

Ecosia:

Ecosia’s homepage with autosuggestions

SearchScene:

SearchScene’s homepage with autosuggestions

Although the autocomplete options are fairly similar, you can see that SearchScene gives more options, and the searches that appear are more fully-formed queries.

Final thoughts on Ecosia

So, when it comes to the topic of whether Ecosia is a good search engine, we would say that it’s pretty good but SearchScene is better.

Ecosia should be commended for being one of the first charity search engines out there and having planted over 130 million trees.

Having said that, it’s clear that SearchScene offers all the charitable and environmental benefits of Ecosia while also providing a better search experience. When switching from Google to Ecosia, users must make a significant sacrifice in their search experience. This is far less so with SearchScene.

This article first appeared on Blogspot.