ecosia

[lucy24]

Anyone have any experience with this search engine? I've been seeing it in logs for a while--as a referer, not as a robot--and obviously any search engine that sends you good and useful humans* is worthy of some attention.

Poring over their web page I gather that (a) they're based in Germany although everything is in English and (b) they use Bing's search data.

Under the heading of TIL, from their FAQ:

Q: Does Ecosia have a black background to save energy?
A: No. There was a time before flat screens and laptops when large desktop monitors required slightly less energy to display the color black, as opposed to other colors like green or white. This is no longer the case with modern LCD technology.

So help me, I would have assumed that was just a godforsakenly stupid question. Evidently my memory is not as solid as it once was.


* Cross-checking against piwik reveals that people who initially entered from ecosia tend to stick around and perform further actions.

[keyplyr]

I've been seeing it in logs for a while--as a referer

I've seen the refer spam (bot hits with faked refers.) Not sure I've seen any authentic traffic.

Also, IMO using Bing's search data is not an 'Alternative Search Engine' if that's all that's returned in their SERP.

But I do like trees (as long as I don't have to rake up the leaves.)

[lucy24]

Not sure I've seen any authentic traffic.

That's where cross-checking raw logs against analytics is useful, especially if analytics lives on a different site but it's your own site so you can see the original request* in logs. Site A establishes that it's a human visit; site B shows details of activity other than just requesting pages. One detail of piwik--I suppose GA does the same thing--is that the original referer is included throughout the visit, unlike raw logs where you only see what was sent in the Referer: header. In fact I hardly ever open Piwik as such; I just keep track of what gets requested in logs, and compare it against the real site.

If DDG can use Google's crawl data, I don't see why ecosia (and Yahoo) can't use bing's. Besides, bing makes enough requests for any three normal search engines--especially when it comes to ancient redirects--so may as well make the most of it.


* For some reason, robots have great difficulty coming up with a plausible-sounding monitor size. I can pretty well count on my fingers the number of bona fide humans who have a 1024x768 monitor.

[keyplyr]

I would never... ever put GA code on my pages!

And I'm perfect able to dustinguish bots & scripts from humans :) I'm just not sure if I remember seeing any legit visitors from them. Pretty sure the only times I remember seeing hits with an ecosia refer, they were not human.

I don't consider Yahoo a search engine; not what calls itself Yahoo here in the US. The Yahoo in Europe & Asia is a search engine because it crawls, indexes and returns autonomous results, or it did the last time I checked.

IMO those sites *only* giving search results furnished by a 3rd party, such as Bing, are not Search Engines... no matter what they or others call them.

[Spiekerooger]

Over here in Germany you get some visitors from ecosia that are real, the "Weltverbesserer" (do-gooders?) type.