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
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.
Yeah but open street maps does not handle temporary road closures, construction, or temporary one-ways well…
https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2024/03/30/openstreetmap-temporary-road-closures/
I don’t even know if organic maps respects tags. https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/vuuecd/how_or_where_can_i_submit_temporary_closed_roads/
It certainly doesn’t respect road conditions or road priority. It constantly tries to send me through a 2 meter wide cobblestone and broken up asphalt service road instead of the main residential roads because it “technically” is 50, even with surface marked as bad condition.
I try to contribute to OSM where I can, but i never can trust organic maps to get me somewhere I haven’t been before.
open street maps does not handle temporary road closures, construction, or temporary one-ways well
that sadly depends on your region and the amount of volunteers in your area. I remember reading how OSM was more reliable after the 2023 Turkey earthquake for the first responders than Google Maps, because the changes in the terrain were added there much faster.
I don’t know about the road conditions during the navigation. it definitely does support this kind of data as I input it myself every now and then, but I don’t drive so I haven’t had to try out different OSM navigation algorithms to see if they account for it, or anything like that.
Its already been mentioned but if you don’t need reviews you can use Here WeGo maps. Its a good alternative and with more users (who make fixes if something is missing) it’ll get better and better
@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.
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.
We will develop a privacy-first search index, which will be used by both Ecosia and Qwant, and unlike proprietary solutions, we are making the index available to others.
Both are great! In my experience Qwant gives better search results, so thats what i use. I even prefer Qwant’s results over Google’s. But Ecosia is a great option as well because of the tree planting.
Maybe I’ll use Ecosia again
Good news, needs to happen as fast as possible.
