This is the best way to monetize my searches. And it's so good for whole planet!
Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#22So they get paid by users clicking on ads. But I don't click on ads. Am I costing them money, or just failing to earn them money? What's the deal with Microsoft, is a cut of profits, or pay per 1000 searches?
As they provide a wrapper for Bing and are not running their own search engine infrastructure you're probably not making big costs. I think Microsoft is in this because it's "against Google".
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
They claim to be merging 'traditional' search results from multiple providers, explicitly calling out Oath (Yahoo) as well as Bing. So, hopefully, substantially. Realistically, somewhat. [0] https://duck.co/help/results/sources
Point taken. But privacy-wise, does anybody have any qualms about Ecosia?
I have none. It's Bing and the ad money goes to Ecosia.
Besides that everything I would expect from a search engine probably applies (Microsoft might get to know what I search for etc.).
But taking a little piece of cake away from Google isn't bad either.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#24I love it.
But, the first thing I clicked was the transparency report.
> We publish ... with a delay of 6 weeks ...
But the last report is from October 2018.
Otherwise great stuff, truly inspirational.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
They claim to be merging 'traditional' search results from multiple providers, explicitly calling out Oath (Yahoo) as well as Bing. So, hopefully, substantially. Realistically, somewhat. [0] https://duck.co/help/results/sources
Point taken. But privacy-wise, does anybody have any qualms about Ecosia?
You might want to change the defaults a bit: https://www.ecosia.org/settings
Esp, the disable personalized results.
In their privacy section they do admit to storing identifiable information for at least 7 days (possibly more) to fight spam and improve search results. They also send user identifiable information to bing, as well, who then store it for at least 4 days. Apart from that, they use third party tools in their non-search parts which might be subject to different privacy rules than their main website.
From their app, they send information to Facebook. They use the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as advertisment providers, if I'm not mistaken.
I encourage you to read the fine print here: https://info.ecosia.org/privacy
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#26So they get paid by users clicking on ads. But I don't click on ads. Am I costing them money, or just failing to earn them money? What's the deal with Microsoft, is a cut of profits, or pay per 1000 searches?
As they provide a wrapper for Bing and are not running their own search engine infrastructure you're probably not making big costs. I think Microsoft is in this because it's "against Google".
So you're saying Microsoft is supplying results completely for free?
That sounds unlikely to me, its undercutting their own business.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#27So they get paid by users clicking on ads. But I don't click on ads. Am I costing them money, or just failing to earn them money? What's the deal with Microsoft, is a cut of profits, or pay per 1000 searches?
I don't recommend Ecosia for this reason. You have to expose yourself to ads and click on them for Ecosia to make money. An environmental project that encourages and depends on consumerism isn't something that I want to be part of.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like YaCy (I run a node), but a big problem with it that will prevent it from ever competing with Google/Bing is the lack of a verifiable link graph for ranking results. Right now it basically just uses full text search and a local link graph which is problematic.
>> the lack of a verifiable link graph I hadn't heard about YaCy even though I'm in their game. I too run a search engine that doesn't use a link graph for scoring relevance. My bet is on semantic relevance over PageRank, because I think our understanding of language models have become so sophisticated we can start relying on them solely. Also, it's harder I think to game a language model when compared to a page rank…
> maybe I misunderstood b/c it says here YaCy _has_ a link graph: https://yacy.net/en/API.html
That link graph being referenced is the local nodes one, not a global one. So it only yields links that have been discovered by the node you are sending the request to.
You could send a request to each node individually and aggregate the results, however, you have no way to verify the nodes are being honest without actually crawling those pages yourself.
If I may ask, what is the project that you are working on?
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like YaCy (I run a node), but a big problem with it that will prevent it from ever competing with Google/Bing is the lack of a verifiable link graph for ranking results. Right now it basically just uses full text search and a local link graph which is problematic.
>> the lack of a verifiable link graph I hadn't heard about YaCy even though I'm in their game. I too run a search engine that doesn't use a link graph for scoring relevance. My bet is on semantic relevance over PageRank, because I think our understanding of language models have become so sophisticated we can start relying on them solely. Also, it's harder I think to game a language model when compared to a page rank…
What is your search engine?
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#30So they get paid by users clicking on ads. But I don't click on ads. Am I costing them money, or just failing to earn them money? What's the deal with Microsoft, is a cut of profits, or pay per 1000 searches?
I don't recommend Ecosia for this reason. You have to expose yourself to ads and click on them for Ecosia to make money. An environmental project that encourages and depends on consumerism isn't something that I want to be part of.
This is a very shortsighted and unrealistic way of thinking. Consumerism is core to how our society functions and isn't going away - why should social good and environmentalism fly in contrast to it?
This is the same backwards line of thinking that insists non-profit compensation be lower, leading to our best and brightest wasting away spying on people at Facebook instead of optimizing drug delivery out of Dakar.
Until we get over the fact that there isn't anything inherently wrong with capitalism/consumerism, we won't be able to start making it work for our people and planet. Luckily initiatives like the B-corp are beginning to change this mentality.