• nudny ekscentryk@szmer.info
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    9 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.xyz
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      9 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.ca
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        9 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.

        • ClockworkOtter@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I think local initiatives around the world would mean initiatives around the world which are specifically local, rather than large, multinational planting organisations.

    • joelimgu@lemmy.world
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      9 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.info
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        9 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

    • Sniatch@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Can I ask what search engine you would recommend that is not some kind of misleading or a scam

    • VodkaSolution @feddit.it
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      9 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.works
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      9 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.