I was working at Ecosia in 2014, the position on my CV that makes me the most proud.
Super happy that they showed up here (again). And 50M+ trees now, just amazing.
Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#32I was investigating massive reforestation as a means of reducing greenhouse gases a few days ago. I stumbled upon this hyper-dense technique called the Miyawaki method [1]. Sounds like it's resource-intensive upfront but might be self-sustaining after that. The guy mentioned in [1] has open-sourced the methodology here [2]. [1]: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real... [2]: https://www.afforest…
I first read this article when it was linked on Hacker News. I had always hoped the method would go viral for local environmentalists, hippies, rich landscapers, and Earth/Arbor day organizers.
Planted my first trees a few weeks ago. 2 more acres to go (more if I can buy more land...)
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Unt…
>Until we get over the fact that there isn't anything inherently wrong with capitalism/consumerism
There's loads wrong with it though. We only make it work because we patch it up with numerous environmental laws, social safety nets etc
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#34Wow, this is one of the better attempts to monetize an environmentalists' identity. This could literally be a wrapper around bing/google, very little investment. Build out the tree-planting department as you scale income, without having to solve the hard technical problems at all. Kudos to them! This should be an inspirational example whenever people talk about starting a tech company on minimal code. (Their commitme…
This is litterally a wrapper around bing.
The problem is that the ads are also from Bing — Ecosia doesn't track its users, Bing does.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Microsoft ain't doing it for free, and they are the ones providing the ads. So whenever Ecosia plants trees, that's because Microsoft made money as well.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#36I 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.
For whatever reason the last two transparency reports were only published in their blog. This is the most recent one: https://blog.ecosia.org/december-ecosia-financial-report/
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Unt…
> Consumerism is core to how our society functions and isn't going away - why should social good and environmentalism fly in contrast to it?
Because it's a major contributing factor to the situation we're in. It's a perfectly rational response for environmentalists to choose not to support projects like Ecosia that promote consumerism.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#38Earlier 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?
About Ecosia, none. The ads are from Bing though, and they get user data.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#39I 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.
One of the Devs at Ecosia here. The more up-to-date reports are at our blog: https://blog.ecosia.org/tag/financial-reports/
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#40Wow, this is one of the better attempts to monetize an environmentalists' identity. This could literally be a wrapper around bing/google, very little investment. Build out the tree-planting department as you scale income, without having to solve the hard technical problems at all. Kudos to them! This should be an inspirational example whenever people talk about starting a tech company on minimal code. (Their commitme…
It wraps bing. This is the 2nd time I've come across Ecosia, today I added the add-on to Firefox. Here's to hoping they actually plant the trees!
Not sure my word is going to mean much, but yes, we do indeed plant these trees :) We also publish regular tree updates to make the impact more visible (latest one is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeBhY5m9npE&) and just now some of my colleagues are in Indonesia: https://www.facebook.com/ecosia/videos/1056643057857650/
We also use a ODK-backed system for monitoring, where our partners on the ground fill in surveys about the trees they planted.