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Plant trees while you search the web

info.ecosia.org

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#71
post #64
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the population would produce half the emissions and consume half the resources considering the same emissions per capita per country and equivalent population density per country.

We cannot kill half of the population but we can consume half. We could avoid replacing phones every two years. We could eat less meat. We could avoid having so many cars.

Surely you know what that first sentence sounds like :)

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#72

I just tried to use the search engine without Javascript and that's a really bad result. [1] [1] https://imgur.com/a/ybtiAkk

I doubt they bother wasting their resources on optimizing for the 0.001% of people who have JS disabled.

Well I just tried this in my text-based browser on my Commodore 64 and it looks terrible

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#73
post #64
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the population would produce half the emissions and consume half the resources considering the same emissions per capita per country and equivalent population density per country.

We cannot kill half of the population but we can consume half. We could avoid replacing phones every two years. We could eat less meat. We could avoid having so many cars.

Yes, they have too many cars, and also make stuff not enough durable. If you (and I) do not have any children then human population of future can be reduced hopefully; currently human population is too much but that is one way to reduce in future. There is some other way as well, I think (but, you should not just kill everyone (regardless of their species) just to reduce the population; only for self-defense or for food).

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#74
post #54
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, here you go: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206019452-How-d... Like any other search engine, Ecosia earns money from clicks on the advertisements that appear above and beside the search results. The advertisements on Ecosia are clearly labeled as Ads and are text links to websites that pay for each click by users. The ads are delivered to you by our partner Bing, who pays Ecosia a share of the rev…

Somehow the math doesn't add up for me. If these numbers are to be believed, planting a tree costs maybe 50 cents, max. I am....skeptical.

This charity focuses on tree planting and this page has a breakdown on the costs a bit down the page: https://onetreeplanted.org/pages/about-us

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#75
post #53

https://blog.ecosia.org/content/images/2019/06/Financial-Rep... From their infographic, you can see that Ecosia donates 51.6% of its income to planting trees, the rest going to employee incomes, reserves, and "spreading the word". You can save yourself the extra step and simply donate to the foundations that Ecosia donates money to: edenprojects.org hommesetterro.com greenbeltmovement.org itpa.org.br

Their point is that you don't need to pay/donate money, only using their product for something you need anyway, ie. search, and generate funding for planting trees.

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#76
post #66
post #14

If you don't click on ads, or have an Adblocker installed, you generate no money for Ecosia. Thus, no trees get planted. I think it's important to point this out, because in their marketing, they make it sound as if searching alone is enough. There's also this little counter in the upper right corner. 45 searches (on average) are required to plant a tree. Of course, only if you click on an ad. You could even argue th…

I mean, maybe this is obvious, but whenever you visit a site that derives revenue from ads with an adblocker installed, you generate no money for that site, and thus X doesn't get supported, where X might be journalism, services, or in this case planting trees.

Not sure about journalism, but aren’t ads usually pay-for-clicks and not pay-for-impressions? Hence, if you never click on ads, there is no benefit for a newspaper, but lots of tracking for you.

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#77

ecosia financial reports: https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...

For 170k euors spent in salaries they are able to hire 39 people. Seems quite less from the US standard.

That value is per month, which would be roughly 2 million euros / year. An average of 50k euro / (person * year), seems pretty reasonable.

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#78
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not impossible. Microsoft offers a pay-as-you-go Bing Search API ( https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-... ). I can only assume ecosia share this data with Microsoft because doing so has allowed them to land a more lucrative deal.

I would assume they send the IP so that Bing will return location specific search results for weather, local businesses and such. I see no reason to assume malicious intent.

What’s stopping them from performing an offline IP location lookup and requesting location specific search results without sharing the IP with Microsoft?

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#79
post #6

7 million active users, 70 million trees... only 10 trees have been planted per user? I like the idea but I wonder on average just how many searches it takes for one tree to be planted.

...how much profit do you think a search engine makes per user?

Way more than what Ecosia's managed so far. Others here have said they only earn from clicks though. Because they aren't selling user data on the side and they are a business with their own expenses, maybe this amount is as optimized as possible.

Re: Plant trees while you search the web

#80
post #20
post #14

If you don't click on ads, or have an Adblocker installed, you generate no money for Ecosia. Thus, no trees get planted. I think it's important to point this out, because in their marketing, they make it sound as if searching alone is enough. There's also this little counter in the upper right corner. 45 searches (on average) are required to plant a tree. Of course, only if you click on an ad. You could even argue th…

> I think it's important to point this out, because in their marketing, they make it sound as if searching alone is enough. Thank you for pointing that out. There is no point using it for search if you are using ad-blocking software.

Apparently the search queries are sent to bing, including ip addresses and the like. If it was more anonymized I would use it in a heartbeat
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