Lilo Search popped up in our Koko Analytics referrer logs. Lilo touts itself as a charitable search engine. Users can make accounts and dedicate revenue generated from their searches (known as “drops”) to specified charitable endeavors. In this way, the idea behind Lilo is similar to the idea behind Ecosia and other search tools dedicated to supporting environmental and other charitable causes.
Lilo Search relies on Bing’s index like most of the popular alternative search tools. It generates revenue from Bing Ads. Although Lilo’s primary focus is on charity rather than privacy, its privacy page evinces a reasonably strong privacy policy, albeit it relies a bit on being based in France (similar to Qwant). Lilo’s statement that it does not accept scripts or third party cookies appears to be mostly true, although it does try to connect to bing.com for the first page of search results (likely due to Bing ads). The search UI is standard, but the Bing ads are intrusive on the first page of results (and they also appear in a side-bar). One interesting feature that Lilo has is that users can choose to direct some queries to Google, albeit this functionality is handled better with DuckDuckGo’s bangs and Qwant’s equivalent (especially because Google searches can be directed to Startpage in those cases). All-in-all, Lilo looks like a solid option for people who like charitable search engines, although I would personally recommend using the best search engine for one’s own work flow and donating to charitable causes separately.