It’s worth noting that the “trees planted” counter is basically an estimate as to how much ad revenue on average is generated from a user based on their number of searches. If you block ads at all, you’re probably not contributing to their revenue at all, thus planting nothing.
I like the idea, but don’t see it as worth sacrificing privacy or allowing ads. Tossing a few bucks every now and then to a charity might be a better option for some.
It’s great that the option exists for those that don’t care about their digital footprint and also want to just passively contribute without “spending” a cent. Not for everyone for sure.
I was under the impression that they anonymized your search results within a week. How is that sacrificing privacy?
You’re right, your IP is anonymized after 1 week. Their privacy policy seems great to me. I just turn off uBlock origin for Ecosia and don’t mind quickly scrolling past a couple of ads at the top of results.
It’s my firefox default search and I rack up a ton of trees for doing many quick and basic searches. If I ever need a more complex search, I use a different site. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing commitment.
https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/33-how-does-ecosia-make-money
Ecosia only gets money from ads if you click on a link, so if you quickly scroll past them all the time you might as well leave uBO on.
They also said you shouldn’t just click on ads randomly, it won’t help.
They say
What if I never click on ads?
That’s fine, every additional user makes Ecosia more attractive to advertisers. The best way to support our mission is to use Ecosia like you would use any other search engine.
Don’t be concerned if you rarely click on ads, simply by being an Ecosia user you’re adding to the size of our user base and turning an everyday action into something positive. The more people collectively that use Ecosia means we have a wider reach and ultimately can plant more trees.
Their answers there do make it sound like clicks are necessary, but it’s my understanding that each search query also has a fixed rate. Advertisers pay for both clicks and impressions. That’s why everyone gets a tree counter that goes up for just searching. Granted it’s a very small earning for impressions, which is why it takes ~50 searches for a single tree.
Because there are search engines out there who don’t commit your IP/search terms to disk at all for any length of time. Search engines like Startpage, Brave Search, and DDG. Users of those would be sacrificing privacy to use Ecosia.
The money used to plant trees also comes from somewhere, namely advertising. It’s fair to assume most web-based advertisers are privacy-hostile and once you click ads served to you from Ecosia to actually generate them revenue, you are then directed to the advertiser’s site and subject to their privacy policy, which is likely a lot more loose. Allowing Ecosia’s ads through your filters is sacrificing privacy.
The Privacy Policy you linked also talks vaguely about working with and providing “metadata” and such to “third party providers” for a variety of uses, with apparently optional “personalization” and whatnot.
I don’t think their privacy policy is a complete disaster when you compare it to mainstream search engines like Google or Bing directly, which they go to great lengths to point out in their own policy with the “hey, we’re not as bad as the other guy!” rhetoric. But there are more private search options out there, hence my earlier post’s allusion to sacrificing privacy.
Which charities specifically do this kind of stuff?
I really like Mossy Earth. They also do ecosystem restoration projects and you get access to all their survey’s and video updates of their progress.
Plant trees? You can check out https://teamtrees.org/
https://www.treedom.net/ does it
Been using it for over 10 years. I have loved the transparency reports, and only wish there were other social and environmental programs we could help with an idea like this. You know, other than freerice.
that’s a long time, if you don’t mind, how many trees did you plant?
Not OC, but my primary computer is currently at 79 after a bit over a year of use.
Its powered by Bing which is meh but I don’t mind it so much. If I don’t get good results I throw in “#g” in my search and it will run the query with Google.
honestly, i’m using for a week and i’m a pretty technical person, i always get good results searching about technical issues and linux(thats a pretty niche too) i can’t complain, but maybe with others affairs it’s isn’t so good?, anyway good to know about that shortcut
I use ecosia for the same use case and get bad results frequently, so I have to switch to startpage sometimes
I like it more than Google tbh.
The first 20ish results of Google are either shops, YouTube or Google just struck out words of my search on it’s own. Google search has already been ruined by them.
It’s shit.
- You have to enable ads for it to work.
- It defaults to your IP location to set the default language.
- You can’t one click toggle to English / International like with DDG but have to go through a drop down menu.
- Search results ertr hot garbage when I used it.
At least it got a native dark mode now I guess but it’s still unusable for me.
Search results are the exact same as Bing iirc.
i get the rest of the points but ads? they need to get the revenue to actually plant the trees 🤨
many missunderstand that. And have adblocker activated.
And I will never click on ads, I can’t even stand seeing them, so there would be no revenue anyway. I want search results, not what some algorithm thinks should become my next shopping trip.
i very well understand the sentiment but there are exceptions, this is one kinda clever way to make money without relying on someone emptying their wallets for the sake of trees, which, considering they may be already donating to other sources, could be an addition.
Worth mentioning, that its an german non-profit project. Also it uses Bing’s Search-Engine.
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I moved to Duck Duck Go a while ago, partly for privacy reasons and partly because Google was becoming very top heavy with ads. It’s still a better search engine so I’ll use it occasionally, but only if DDG is really not getting what I need.
Do you know how good Ecosia is in terms of privacy? If it’s as good as DDG, then sure I’d use it.
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Ddg is not that good for privacy and gives really bad search results, so give Startpage a try
Our Changing Climate did a video on Ecosia [7:28]. Apparently it’s pretty legit.
But it still doesn’t solve the issue though of being required to look at corporate ads which are designed to increase consumption in order to solve climate issues. We will never be able to advertise our way out of this.
I know it’s not a perfect solution but considering the options, it’s better to “sell” my attention to corporate ads in exchange of planting trees than nothing. Even then, I rarely see ads after whitelisting the site.
As far as my research goes, Ecosia seems quite reputable and I support their mission. If they’re proven to be otherwise in the future, I won’t have a problem to jump ship.
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Are the results good? I looked into it recently and thought the sample results on their webpage were poor. For their example “Steve Jobs” Search three of the top results where just the same Wikipedia page but in different languages
Dang, three weeks in and my post got reposted?
:P
Could you send us a link here :) Instead of just saying “Wow my post got reposted!” Thanks!
Psh, nah I don’t care, and I don’t think this person was intentionally reposting. I think they just had the same idea. Plus, this post is more popular, and I want everyone to plant as many trees as they can!
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Been using Ecosia for years. With Startpage as a backup.
Same, I have Startpage on Firefox bound to “sp” so I just need to type sp in the search bar to search with startpage instead. It’s great.
I was thinking about it because I recalled people using it, and was wondering if it had its own search engine or they were just embedding Google or Bing in their page. Apparently it is the latter.
Gotta love them tree NFTs.
Does it display dates on results? A lot of alternative I’ve tried don’t and I hate that…as a big Reddit searcher
