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
- 🦊Ecosia Search - Add-on for Mozilla Firefox
- đź’»On Desktop: Make Ecosia your default on your browser
- 📱On Mobile: Use Ecosia App or make it your default search
- Ecosia Search Results: How to enable ads on Ecosia when using ad blockers
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
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
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
Maybe there should be known public crawlers hosted by several people that would set up some kind of shared but separated indices, and people could self host their own search page and set it to subscribe to these indices and filter for sites they care about. The index hosted by one person must be public and easily recreated elsewhere, so that if they can’t host it anymore for whatever reason, others can fill the gap.
Or! Each server would kind of be in some federation, and we all have our own index, some overlapping. The overlapping simply becomes a kind of redundancy.
Sorry if that makes zero sense or is a bad idea. Just tossing it out cause I thought it might be somewhat viable after some (or much) tweaking. Been somewhat interested in information retrieval lately and this is making my little brain kind of excited.