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Ecosia – A search engine that plants trees
- kitkat_new 6y agoif you find it acceptable to watch ads (I don't), use it
- x32n23nr 6y agoHow much would you be willing to pay for search as a premium service?
- kitkat_new 6y agodepends
- toper-centage 6y agoDepends on what? Let's assume we're talking Bing-level quality and DDG-level privacy. How much would you pay per month?
- kitkat_new 6y agoa lot of factors - future potential - features/technology behind it - feelings - financial situation - alternatives - need for a search engine I don't even know if I'd pay anything at all.
- input_sh 6y agoI'd pay 5-10 bucks a month without a second thought. That'd amount to something like 420-840 bucks to DDG since I've roughly started using it (somewhere around Snowden leaks). It's not a larger amount than they would earn from me if I didn't use an ad-blocker, but it's 100% larger than they've earned from me over the years.
- tssva 6y agoSo who do you use for search? The most mentioned around here is Duck Duck Go but they derive their income from ads also.
- kitkat_new 6y agoI mostly use Google
- tssva 6y ago"if you find it acceptable to watch ads (I don't), use it" "I mostly use Google" Are you trolling?
- kitkat_new 6y agono, I am not
- mg 6y agoEnd of last year, I made a page to compare alternative search engines: https://www.gnod.com/search/ https://www.gnod.com/search/ You can switch on Ecosia when you click on "Select Engines".
- vorticalbox 6y agohttps://www.gnod.com/search/ https://www.gnod.com/search/
- ColinHayhurst 6y agoA directory of search "engines": https://twitter.com/SearchEngineMap/lists https://twitter.com/SearchEngineMap/lists Who uses what: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ https://www.searchenginemap.com/
- ricardo81 6y agoYou may want to consider adding Mojeek since it does its own crawling (as opposed to the numerous metas using Bing data as per searchenginemap.com) Disclosure, I work there
- mg 6y agoOk, added. I show a short info about each engine. What would be a good info line for Mojeek? What makes it unique?
- ricardo81 6y agoThank you, appreciated. It was/is the world's first general search engine with a no tracking privacy policy.
- mg 6y agoHmm.. since every company promises a focus on privacy, isn't the bigger differentiator for the user that you run your own crawler? Do you use only your own crawling data?
- ricardo81 6y agoGood to see that Apple included them as an alternative default search engine choice. Apparently it's quite popular in the USA and Germany according to Similarweb.
- ignoramous 6y agoEcosia starts their privacy policy with, "We protect your privacy." ...but when you dig in, they: 1. Use Facebook for "conversion tracking". 2. May collect messages, photos, calendar information if you're using the app. 3. Hold on to personally identifiable information for upto 7 days post which they (pseudo)anonymize it to store it indefinitely. Now, without more information on how they do so, I'm not sure I'd trust the effectiveness of their anonymization, given they may store logs (and other metrics) "as long as necessary". 4. Integrate with advertisement platform run by Bing on the search pages (and so they 'don't control the data Bing collects'). Who reads privacy policies, right? Everyone just reads the headlines and FAQs. "Ecosia is a “privacy friendly” search engine. We take user privacy very seriously." Right. I wish they were upfront and admitted to collecting data instead of trying hard to convince they don't do so for nefarious purposes (in their own eyes, that is). https://info.ecosia.org/privacy https://info.ecosia.org/privacy
- beardog 6y agoFurther, the difference between this and how Duckduckgo uses Bing is that DDG does a proper proxy without forwarding your IP or any info about you.
- toper-centage 6y agoEcosia also does that
- ColinHayhurst 6y agoMicrosoft knows what they both do, but ain't saying. Maybe they have the same contract or each syndidation partner has a unique one. Probably the latter. Trying getting a syndication partnership where you don't agree to pass on some part of the IP; I've not heard of anyone getting that but anecdotes is all I have. Microsoft (or Google in the case of their syndication partners) are not going to tell us.
- bboygravity 6y agoRule #1 on the internet: the more a website screams something, the less it's true. Examples: "Our mission is to organize the world's information." (proceeds to organize the world's commercial brands and spam people based on what they do online) "We value freedom of speech." (proceed to literally ban the president, wrong opinions and alternative apps like Parler) "We value your privacy." (Every big"tech"/cloud company ever that sells your data and has an automated system in place to pass all data on to the NSA, authorities and anybody willing to buy data) "Download now" (not actually now, but after you get our download manager adware/cryptolocker) "Download full functional version for free now" (actually a limited trial that you get to use after you dump personal info) "Free trial, unlimited music downloads, cancel any time" (proceed to charge your credit card even though you cancelled the limited DRM download service on time. I'm looking at you Amazon Music)
- rini17 6y agoPlanting trees has became such a marketing gimmick. Preserving old growth forests and restoring wetlands has bigger impact on CO2 and climate.
- kitkat_new 6y agodoing both has an even bigger positive impact
- rini17 6y agoTrees plant naturally themselves (keyword:natural succession) anytime when the land is ready (like not overgrazed, desertified, drained). In such locations the tree planting mania is superfluous even to the point of rejecting spontaneously grown shrubs/trees as "weeds". Such land is needlessly cleared and replanted with trees, with loss of biodiversity. I'm not exaggerating here in europe it happens all the time.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoI thought new growth absorbed marginally more CO2? Happy to be corrected, perhaps you have a source?
- rini17 6y agoOld forests better retain water and thus are able to grow better - marginally accumulate more biomass. I'm NOT against planting trees but against overdoing it as I explain in the other comment. https://envirobites.org/2019/09/24/old-is-better-than-young-the-carbon-sequestration-potential-of-letting-forests-mature/ https://envirobites.org/2019/09/24/old-is-better-than-young-...
- varajelle 6y agoThat's probably true, but when a forest is burned, that's decades of absorbed CO2 that goes back to the atmosphere, which would take another decades to be absorbed by the new trees.
- 6y ago
- Normille 6y agoLaudable concept. But unfortunately (at least when I tried switching to it early last year) the search results were just not very good. You might almost say that, reading them, I couldn't see the wood, for the trees.
- dgellow 6y agoDon't they use Bing as their search engine? Edit: yep, that's the case: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206153381-Where-do-Ecosia-s-search-results-come-from- https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206153381-Where...
- corney91 6y agoThis is my go-to search engine, it's pretty good. While I like the idea of a privacy-focused search engine eg. DuckDuckGo, I think the climate is a more important issue and I figure at least Ecosia is based in the EU where they're more likely to comply with the GDPR. 99% of my searches can be found by any engine and it's trivial to add a shortcut to other engines, so I don't base my default choice on search results (within reason of course). That's my reasoning around the two common issues anyway.
- ffpip 6y agoThis doesn't do a proper proxy to bing btw. Bing is loaded in your browser, not on their server. It knows who you are and what you search. Might as well use Google for better search results than bing. Unless you really wanna help plant trees. DDG does a proper proxy.
- abc-xyz 6y ago> DDG does a proper proxy. How do you know? I mean they’re closed source and you have no idea what data they send to Microsoft’s Bing and Advertising APIs.
- ffpip 6y agoDDG does a proper proxy from my side. Bing is not loaded when I load duckduckgo.com, unlike ecosia which loads bing.net and bing.com subdomains right in my browser.
- lucb1e 6y agoI was confused what you meant by DDG properly proxying stuff. When arguing for DDG, people often say that you can still use !g to get google results (for example) and that sounds great, but when you try it, it doesn't proxy at all, you are literally redirected to Google and it doesn't add anything. But I think you're talking about which index it is that DDG queries internally to yield regular (non-bang) search results?
- 6y ago
- rakoo 6y agoImportant to know: Ecosia only receives money if you click on ads. It doesn't get any if you merely display them, and even less if you block them.
- kitkat_new 6y agohmm, they get money although you block the ads? Really?
- toper-centage 6y agoYes that's true. But you know how on YouTube you only receive ad money after you have a certain number of views? And the more views the bigger the % of ad revenue? Bing Ads is the same
- rakoo 6y agoIndeed, but with the typical HN audience that has a higher anti-ad bias than the rest of the population, I was thinking it was important to remind that merely switching to Ecosia will not totally help them
- k1m 6y agoI don't know if they still do this, but not long ago they used to try and get you to switch off your ad blocker with an obnoxious message saying "Ads plant trees! We’ve detected that you are using an ad blocker. We plant trees thanks to income earned from ads. Please disable your ad blocker for Ecosia so that we can keep on planting."
- JosephRedfern 6y agoAs a counter-argument, is it not a little obnoxious to use Ecosia with your ad-blocker turned on? What's the point of using Ecosia if not to help them fund-raise for their environmental projects? Why not use Google or Bing directly (with an ad-blocker) and save the Ecosia the bandwidth costs?
- 6y ago
- indysigners 6y agoI was using Ecosia for a number of weeks and did achieve some 80 planted trees over the course of that period. However, I eventually was so frustrated over the poor search results that I did move back to DDG. Ecosia‘s intentions might be noble and worth supporting, but I cannot really follow how one can stay with them when the overall experience is so poor. I don’t even mind some possible privacy issues as noted above but it all comes down to being at least comparably good to Google and DDG. Which is sadly not the case with Ecosia.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoWait, aren't DDG and Ecosia using the same search engine under the hood (bing)? How would you be getting different results from them?
- zed88 6y agoI hope they aren't planting monocultures instead of mixed forests. If they do...they are no better than the Chinese.
- arisAlexis 6y agocheck out oceanhero.today similar concept removes plastic from the ocean.
- sixti60 6y agoI am always surprised when (be it greenwashing or not) companies call themselves "search engine" when in fact ... they actually aren't a search "engine". They don't have any indexing/searching technology, they just re-use another search technology in white-label. We can criticize Google for many things, but at least those guys really built a technology, from scratch. TL;DR: Calling Ecosia a search engine is like calling yourself a "restaurant" when all you're actually doing is reheating factory-prepared meals.
- reaperducer 6y agoCalling Ecosia a search engine is like calling yourself a "restaurant" when all you're actually doing is reheating factory-prepared meals. You might be surprised how many restaurants do this. Even in the days before ghost kitchens.
- Kiro 6y agoSo DDG is not a search engine either?
- dgut 6y agoShameless plug, I run Okeano which intends to spend 80% of profits to clean up the ocean by purchasing river interceptors from the Ocean Cleanup Project. We support domain blocklist natively and are (very) privacy friendly: https://okeano.com/privacy https://okeano.com/privacy https://okeano.com https://okeano.com
- shadowfaxRodeo 6y agoThis looks really interesting. Bookmarked it. Thanks for your work. But is there any way of verifying if what you're saying is true?
- dgut 6y agoThank you. When we can afford it -- we will definitely run multiple independent audits to verify our privacy claims. At the moment there isn't any simple way to do it. You'll have to take my word for it. We are currently not making money, but when we do we'll be very transparent about it including (if we reach that point), about interceptor purchases. Feel free to send me any feedback/suggestions/comments to david at okeano.com if you find any quirks. Appreciate it :)
- arendtio 6y agoIs there some kind of search phrase where you would say, that your search engine returns better results than the competition?
- dgut 6y agoIf you add Pinterest to your blocklist [1], does that count as better results? That said, we have our own index of websites posted on HN and other interesting communities. It will add filters like size and "privacy rank". Unfortunately it's not possible to experiment with it in production yet. [1] https://okeano.com/blocklist https://okeano.com/blocklist
- arendtio 6y ago
- nalekberov 6y agoFor the first time I used Ecosia to search something through VPN connection, I ran into Google ReCaptcha challenge. Ok, not too bad.
- calmworm 6y agoSimilar experience. It was fine for some time, then I started getting ReCaptcha challenges every time... back to DDG it is.
- niutech 6y agoPrevious thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324766
- rexreed 6y agoIt's a marketing gimmick. And I guess it works since we're talking about it.
- hk__2 6y agoCan you elaborate? “It’s a marketing gimmick” is a judgement without any value if you don’t explain why you think that.
- fortran77 6y ago"Why Planting Trees Won't Save Us" https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/tree-planting-wont-stop-climate-crisis-1020500/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/tree...
- IkmoIkmo 6y agoI hate this thing with a passion, my corporate job mandates it and you can't turn it off, so Ecosia is the default search engine. 9/10 times I type something in Chrome's URL bar it's 'Google'. There's no opt-out. Ecosia is fine but I just don't get the corporate policy. It's making my work a lot more inefficient, and when I worked for clients (I currently work for internal clients which isn't chargeable) I billed $300 per hour. An Ecosia search is worth half a cent, you need 45 searches to plant one tree. Suppose I do 20 searches in a day, that's 10 cents. Suppose the extra search to Google takes 3 seconds, at a billabe rate of $300 that's 25 cents times 20 searches is 500 cents, about 50x whatever Ecosia is gaining. I just don't get why my employer can't just pay 20 cents into Ecosia's tree fund, get the same marketing, contribute 2x as much to trees, save 25x as much money on this thing and save me frustration. If I then figure that (1) a search for Google (I don't use Ecosia search results at all) is not contributing any revenue at all and (2) even those who use Ecosia search results are getting worse and less time-efficient information versus Google, the economics of simply letting people use Google instead of Ecosia (Bing) and contributing the equivalent in money, makes even more sense. And then (3) corporate actively does not want you to go shopping online during work. This idea to show ads during workhours when employees just want search results is a ridiculous idea. Other than that I think Ecosia is a great idea, but it must be opt-outable. tl;dr I hate big corporates. In other words, at the cost of 8 cents per second in billable time, I'm generating half a cent
- growt 6y agoThe billable $300 an hour go to your company. So if your company can charge for more time because you spend more time searching, that's actually good for your employer!
- tlrobinson 6y agoOf course that only works if there is no competition that is more efficient.
- IkmoIkmo 6y agoHaha, not sure if you're serious but of course charging doesn't work that way. Otherwise it'd make sense for every company to just implement as many unnecessary time-sinks as possible. Being higher-cost than competitors (or hell, even higher-cost without competitors) without adding proportionate value (e.g. when you add a time-sink) will lose you business. Second, as immoral as it may sound, plenty of companies or rather employees within companies don't write time purely on a time-spent basis. Time spent is one of the variables, but you'll mostly look at sensibility and industry practices, too. If you did project X for a client for $10k and can modify it and do it for $8k for client Y the week after, you're likely still going to charge something close to $10k even if you didn't spend the time. And vice versa, if you bid aggressively on a project claiming you can do it in less-than-ideal amount of time and spend more time anyway, you'll get push-back and will not be able to charge it fully. In other words, operational efficiencies are helpful in a world in which you agree to get paid on a time-spent basis.
- MarcScott 6y agoWe had a developer from Ecosia on the Raspberry Pi Livestream a few months back, if anyone is interested, along with a code along Scratch video for the kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMlaVVr0X98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMlaVVr0X98
- stuartbman 6y agoI work in a hospital. They have switched the default search engine to ecosia. All adverts are blocked, so it cant help plant trees, and because it's bing, the carbon footprint is then positive (rather than at least neutral with Google). So it's all virtue signalling. Worst of all, we get worse results, all the time, and I think this will indirectly affect patient care.
- toper-centage 6y agoEcosia actually covers the Bing side of things on their own solar footprint, and report 200% coverage with solar.
- Fiahil 6y agoI’d love to plant a few ecosia-sponsored trees in my city. but, of course, it’s not possible do that here because they’re not _actually_ planting trees. They’re just giving money to someone else.
- giarc 6y agoI wouldn't trust an add-on company to be able to plant trees properly, and why would we? I'd rather they be the middle man between me and the tree planting companies.
- Can_Not 6y agoEcosia, the Android app that is a browser with this search engine as a default, installed a search bar into my taskbar without my consent. It disappeared recently. Does anyone know how to get it back?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sneakyStevie 6y agoSearch results are kinda Garbage though.