200 million trees
blog.ecosia.org
Here's to 200 million thriving trees, and counting.
  • nudny ekscentryk@szmer.infoEnglish
    3112·
    10 months ago

    This is a necessary reminder that Ecosia is a scam:

    • they don’t “plant trees” but rather contribute very little amounts to existing programmes
    • “Every search plants a tree” is a lie. It’s not every search, but rather every couple clicks on an ad
    • They use Bing results making them useless

    If you’re using Ecosia with an adblocker or knowingly skip over sponsored results then you are NOT in any way contributing to the tree-planting

    • Star@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      17·
      10 months ago

      they don’t “plant trees” but rather contribute very little amounts to existing programmes

      Ofcourse they don’t plant trees themselves, it’s a search engine with a small team. They donate their entire profit which averages upwards of a million euros every month, to local tree planting initiatives across the world and that isn’t a ‘little’ number at all.

      “Every search plants a tree” is a lie. It’s not every search, but rather every couple clicks on an ad

      I agree, they were ‘a bit’ misleading with that in the past. Although they did state in their tree counter earlier and somewhere in their website/blog that it was roughly 45 searches (in Germany, depends on region) which raised enough money to plant a tree. They’ve since removed most, if not all of the misinformation.

      They use Bing results making them useless

      Since when does using Bing results make a search engine a ‘scam’? DuckDuckGo also uses Bing results, would you call that a scam as well? Ecosia uses Bing search results because it’s close to impossible to make an independent search engine which gives satisfactory results without the resources of a tech giant.

      • meseek #2982@lemmy.caEnglish
        14·
        10 months ago

        to local tree planting initiatives across the world

        Pick a lane. It can’t be both. Either they donate to local initiatives or global ones. Pick one.

        Also Ecosia is a not for profit company. They don’t hide that fact.

    • joelimgu@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      10 months ago

      But they are pretty clear about that. Also, how is that worse than Google or bing? It’s not a dream sure, but its a lot better than your money going to Google

      • nudny ekscentryk@szmer.infoEnglish
        62·
        10 months ago

        they are not “clear about that”. I can see they removed it now but for the longest time the main page had a banner saying “every search plants a tree” and also an actual counter which went up by one every time you made a search – which was misleading, because it wasn’t every “search”, because you would have to click on an ad, and it wasn’t “every”, because it took several clicks on an ad to actually contribute an equivalent of a tree

    • VodkaSolution @feddit.itEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      I think your second and third point are well known or at least easily conceivable, but where did you get your first point from? Plain curiosity

    • YungOnions@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      52·
      10 months ago

      I’d rather ‘little contribution’ than none at all. I’d rather ‘every couple of clicks’ than none at all. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the major alternatives.

  • fiat_lux@kbin.social
    14·
    10 months ago

    Can we… see them?

    Edit: some quick math, the minimum recommended space between trees is 3m, 200 million of those is 600km² / 148k ac , which would make the space required bigger than 17 countries (larger than Andorra but very slightly smaller than Saint Lucia). They have a blog with their tree planting updates but I wish there were more photos.

  • uuhhhhmmmm@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    101·
    10 months ago

    They integrated AI chat which is using OpenAI technology. So they’re paying for ChatGPT API instead of spending this money on trees? And doesn’t running generative AI consume a lot of electricity?

    • myxi@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      We have estimated the carbon footprint of our AI chatbot and according to our first estimates it does not significantly increase the overall carbon footprint of Ecosia. The estimate takes into account that Ecosia searches are already 200% carbon negative,as we produce twice as much energy as is consumed by our search engine. We are currently working with two universities to refine our carbon footprint assessment.

      Unfortunately the more important issue is that the leading language AI model providers are still not transparent about the energy consumption of their models, so without this clarity we can only make rough estimations of our impact. We will continue to monitor our energy usage and urge leading AI companies to do the same and be transparent about their impact.

      (https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/534-ecosia-chat-ai)

      I am not against it. I don’t want to miss out on AI to support this search engine. It’s quite helpful to me, and I assume many others. I think this search engine should compete with other search engines so that more users use it. I am already a fan of their Ecosia Chat; the interface is fast and the responses are even faster. Bing Chat is just awful; it’s slow both in terms of interface and text generation

    • hannes3120@feddit.deEnglish
      33·
      10 months ago

      Running AI doesn’t - training an AI is where the real power hungry stuff happens