Search the net - and do something for the environment :)

It is not that easy to find an replacement for google – often the search results are just better then those of the competitors. Except Yahoo – I like their results, but the user interface is not as good as google’s.

But now I have found a solution that works for me: ecosia.org.

It uses the search of Yahoo and bing and has a nice (simple) interface. And it is about the Rainforest. The site displays ads from Yahoo and Microsoft to earn money the usual way. But 80% of this money, they spend to a Rainforest project of the WWF. Besides this, their servers use green electricity and do not store personal information.

The concept convinced me.

Search from the terminal

Since this is a Ruby blog… I have to write something about Ruby ;).

Like lots of other people, I am lazy. And sometimes I am at the (bash) terminal and want to look up something on the internet. But instead of having to find my firefox, open a new tab, select the right search engine, enter the search term and hit enter, I can now do

form the console to search for “google eats itself”.

This is achieved by three little steps:

1 – Create the ruby starter “script”

At some place (for example your homefolder), create ecosia.rb:

 1
2

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
`firefox -new-tab http://ecosia.org/search.php?q=#{$**'+'}`

2 – Make the file executable

chmod +x ecosia.rb

3 – Create an alias

Open up the .bashrc in your home folder and insert alias e path/to/the/script/ecosia.rb. Save the file and type source .bashrc (or restart the terminal).


[ Oh, and I changed the design of the blog… I must admit, that the previous version looked pretty ugly at some machines ]