For the people who have not yet decided on a search engine. The most EU way you can go is Ecosia or Qwant as they are building their own search index.
Ecosia is my personal pick as its also aimed at planting trees and they have quite a good browser alongside it.
Great! Ecosia works super well, and it feels good to not having to rely on google to find things. Only thing I’d wish for is that they’d have some map service or similar to find restaurants and shop. There is sadly no good replacement for google maps that I’ve found
@Extrawurst @Kualdir For Navigation alone, I find Magic Earth (which uses OSM] to be a perfectly fine replacement, that even offers some features Gmaps hasn’t. Like being able to download whole countries for offline navigation, Driver Assistance etc.
For the reviews… That’s more difficult. https://lib.reviews/ is one attempt, but it has nowhere near the dataset (duh) and the reviews are not directly visible on the map.
Here we go, is a pretty good alternative.
i mean you kinda need to specify what you want from a map, there are a bunch of things that google maps is actively the worst at
For sure, one specific thing is being able to find a restaurant in the vicinity, seeing some kind of review system of its reception, and knowing if it’s open or not and having a link to a menu or its homepage. Another (albeit extremely specific) case is looking up a secondhand store in the vicinity of where I am - I tried this with here wego when I was out recently but it showed me a store that no longer existed. Of course might be a unlucky coincidence (google maps for sure has nonexisting stores too), but I’m 0 for 1 atm.
best alternative would probably be something like tripadvisor, for restaurants
obviously it’s not exactly a vastly less shitty option, but at least it’s not google.
Oh yea tripadvisor might be the option, thanks for the tip!
You could also use open street maps. For mobile I recommend using Organic Maps.l Only problem is, that the search isn’t that good.
Organic Maps
Ecosia works well enough for me too. The tree planting thing should never be forgotten. The scope of their work is impressive and they’re very transparent about their goals and funding. No other search engine comes close to that.
The tree planting sounds so much like greenwashing and an excuse to serve ads
I listened to a podcast a couple years ago. The founder talked about how he made sure that Ecosia can not be sold and monetized, he himself is not making much money from it. My english is not good enough to explain it in more detail. :)
I see greenwashing everywhere, but as far as I can tell from the podcast and their YouTube, this is legit.
200 million trees. Far from greenwashing.
Folks, critical thinking is more important than ever these days. Making conclusions based on a brain fart - when we have the internet at our fingertips - is partly why the world is the way it is.
Try Here WeGo maps, it’s the closest one to Google maps but European