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Ecosia, the search engine that sells you a good feeling by misleading you. The claim they make is: If you use Ecosia for searching on the internet, they will p
by WA 5y ago
Ecosia, the search engine that sells you a good feeling by misleading you.
The claim they make is: If you use Ecosia for searching on the internet, they will plant a tree. On average, a tree for every 43 searches or so.
In reality, they plant only trees if you click on ads. If you use Ecosia with an adblocker, you don't make them plant trees. You actually increase the CO2 footprint, because they are a front end for Bing. Searching with Ecosia = more servers involved to route your search keywords, possibly less relevant results, resulting in even more searches.
Yes, "if you click on ads, we plant trees" is nothing they want to say on their landing page. It might even be problematic to say this, because it encourages click fraud. But still, I hate the misleading messaging.
- lopis 5y agoYou have a point, but Ecosia strives to be carbon negative, including trying to compensate Bing's emissions (which Bing doesn't make clear how much is carbon neutral) [0]. And while you are right more users, even users that block all ads, is a good thing. If nothing else, being in the top 5 search engines in many countries assures Ecosia is present in Android's search engine choice screen [1]. [0] https://blog.ecosia.org/why-carbon-neutral-is-not-enough-ecosia-has-built-its-own-solar-plants/ https://blog.ecosia.org/why-carbon-neutral-is-not-enough-eco... [1] https://www.android.com/choicescreen/ https://www.android.com/choicescreen/