Not sure how sustainable their business model is and I'm not a fan of Bing, but they are a decent bunch of people who have hired devs with unusual backgrounds (like me) and support the tech community over here by hosting a lot of meetups. I started using their search engine after going to some of these events :)
Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#52Who owns the land you're planting on?. How can you guarantee it won't be used in the future? Companies that cause pollution should also pay a tax to repair it. This should be enforced at a government level. Maybe by UN? seeing as the environment is something countries share despite their political ideologies. It's sad we can't hold governments more accountable for false promises. I remember all the g8 summits 10+ years ago politicians back slapping and saying we'd fix this and that by 2020. Everything seems worse no? Also internet searches cost energy? Is this just offsetting? Good to hear it may be working, 51mil trees is quite a claim. I laughed this off last time I saw it as there's always someone making money of charities. It sounds like a false economy to me which you can't accurately measure results. But any effort is better than none I guess.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#53The big question here is "what trees?" If Ecosia are planting Acacia in Spain, as seen in their map, this is wrong. Wattle is invasive in southern Europe. Some are even in the catalogue of forbidden by law species. They displace native species and are a big problem in Portugal after fire forests for example. Some species are also poisonous to cattle and wild animals Please, left conservation efforts to professionals.…
If you scroll down a screen you will see a slideshow with information about the actual projects, not just a map with a logo indicating where the projects take place. The project in Spain does not plant Acacia trees.
Pinus, Juniperus, Quercus and Rhamnus,... okay, that's much better.
https://www.noticiasdealmeria.com/terminan-los-trabajos-de-p...
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#54Who owns the land you're planting on?. How can you guarantee it won't be used in the future? Companies that cause pollution should also pay a tax to repair it. This should be enforced at a government level. Maybe by UN? seeing as the environment is something countries share despite their political ideologies. It's sad we can't hold governments more accountable for false promises. I remember all the g8 summits 10+ yea…
I linked this a different comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ld0EDDQZg4& This is our tree planting officer explaining (among other things) how he tries to make sure we plant in the right places (and that includes land ownership questions and how to make sure the tress will still be around in a few years).
As for energy consumption, we do offset the CO2 emissions that are associated with searching on Ecosia by running our own solar power plant. Here is some more information on this on our blog: https://blog.ecosia.org/co2-neutral-seach-engine-ecosia-sola...
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#55Trees good. Ads bad.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#56It seems that they started trying a partnership with google but it was unsuccessful. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/google-pulls-t...
I understand Google stance but I think they should have made a bit more effort.
The problem here is that you are not allowed "incentives to click artificially on sponsored links". And the implied message of "click a link, plant a tree" is clearly and artificial incentive, even though there is a disclaimer no one reads. It makes these clicks less valuable (lower conversion rates), advertisers still pay full price, are unhappy, and because advertisers are the true Google customers they make sure it doesn't happen.
But the question would be: why not make "charity clicks", which advertisers can opt in or out of. The best, if a little evil part: good PR for everyone involved. The "plant a tree" search engine gets to grab people. Advertisers can say they support charity by allowing such lower value clicks to go through and Google can do the same. i.e. for one good action, 3 parties can claim responsibility.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#57Earlier 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…
Advertising has shown itself to be a vehicle for malware. Promoting it as something genuine and useful is unethical and short-sighted. Not to mention it doesn't consider the victim here at all.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#58I 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.
I only started at Ecosia in 2016, but I feel you. Not sure if this is appreciated on HN (I only saw a guideline about posts, not comments), but if this piqued someone's interest, we have a bunch of open positions at the moment: https://ecosia.workable.com/
I think that's totally fine to link here. It's certainly something that may be of interest to folks who are in this comment section.
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#59I 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…
> To make soil analysis easy for remote clients, we are also developing a small, GPS-enabled soil probe that will test soil and upload the data onto our server. When the probe is integrated with our database, at the push of a button you’ll know the soil constituents and what nutrients it needs, and we’ll be able to immediately send a complete species list and a detailed procedure.
This is pretty interesting, though I can't find any more information on the website.
I work at Stenon [0], we make a portable soil analysis probe for agriculture - the demand for these devices is huge.
(we are hiring)
[0] - https://stenon.io/en/
Re: Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
#60The big question here is "what trees?" If Ecosia are planting Acacia in Spain, as seen in their map, this is wrong. Wattle is invasive in southern Europe. Some are even in the catalogue of forbidden by law species. They displace native species and are a big problem in Portugal after fire forests for example. Some species are also poisonous to cattle and wild animals Please, left conservation efforts to professionals.…
Perhaps understand what's going on before you climb on your high horse?