Ecosia will now be the default search engine in the Edge browser on Classroom and Library PCs.
What is happening
- From Thursday 6 October the university will start to use a search engine called Ecosia that plants trees!
- After a student raised this as a proposal, the University will now set Ecosia as the default search engine in the Edge browser on Classroom and Library PCs.
- Google will remain the default search engine for Google Chrome.
- This change will allow users to make a sustainable choice aligned to the Universities Aberdeen 2040 commitments on sustainability while allowing Google to remain easily accessible.
What is Ecosia
- Ecosia is a search engine like Google and Bing, except that the revenue is used to plant native trees in woodland restoration projects at appropriate sites around the world, with the mission of reducing carbon and increasing biodiversity.
- Like with other search engines, revenues are made through advertising.
- However, Ecosia does have a good record for showing clearly which content is a paid advertisement within search results.
How will search results differ?
- Ecosia uses the Bing search engine so results will be essentially the same as using Microsoft Bing.
- As the Edge browser is built by Microsoft to work well with Microsoft web apps such as Outlook, paring Ecosia with this browser makes sense.
What if you want to stick to Google?
- Google will remain the default search engine in the Google Chrome web browser and will still be usable on Edge via visiting the website directly.
- While for most basic web searches either search engine will work fine there are cases, especially for searches in languages other than English where Google produces better results.