Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees
ecosia.org
ecosia.org
[1]: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...
This is pretty interesting, though I can't find any more information on the website.
I work at Stenon [0], we make a portable soil analysis probe for agriculture - the demand for these devices is huge.
(we are hiring)
[0] - https://stenon.io/en/
Do you have any information on pricing and availability?
P.S. I'm curious how you're able to accurately measure nitrate and carbon levels. Can you point me to any papers on the techniques you're using?
As for accuracy we have patent pending ML models that provide nutrient predictions that are >= laboratory accuracy. If you are interested please sign up to the waitlist and someone will be in touch!
I'm already in my mid-30's, will I be able to enjoy this for any reasonable portion of my life?
What type of soil and climate? coastal area?
If you have apples you can have also plums and pears. Buy fruit trees grafted, from well and from a good source. Don't seed it. Reserve an area near your home to put it and also some open areas without trees.
> Will trees effectively stop large undergrowth to the point where I can walk around?
Some can do it (after some years), other can't. It depends on the trees, how they are packed, and the area. Beech definitely will kill anything under their canopy at long term and is a really beautiful tree, and many big conifers also, so must be placed carefully (and used sparsely).
Just pick up your own seeds, either plant it or let the nature do gladly the hard work for you.
https://www.nordgen.org/en/jay-expert-planting-oak/
There will be always much more seeds than the ones that will survive at the end. You can rescue seedlings growing in unsuitable areas (next a road for example) that would not survive the lawnmower.
> How much growth per year can I expect?
It depends a lot on the tree and the area, the water available etc. Fast growth is tender and not always desirable. Oaks and other long living trees will put their best efforts to grow under the surface. Don't expect a lot to see the first years but after this phase they will suddenly accelerate. You need first to know what trees are good for your area
If you want fast results, a common technique is to use fast growing / short lived trees and shrubs first (birch or rowan for example). Then seed or wait for other species to reach the area and slowly unfurl.
> How can I provide symbiosis with the nearby protected raised bog and its birds?
Plant fruit shrubs, let dead wood decay in place, use holly and blackthorn to encourage nests...
Avoid spreading invasive Rhododendron in any case.
If you have a bog near your home, the soil could be very poor and acid. This will determine what you can plant and what not. Not all trees can stand a high phreatic level. Willows can, and are easily grown from free cuttings. Rowan are excelent also in acid soils. Most trees will avoid the bog.
Kudos to them! This should be an inspirational example whenever people talk about starting a tech company on minimal code.
(Their commitment to transparency is also pretty neat -- way to understand your customers' values, and identify a niche defined by said values. A fantastic differentiator in a market that's generally commoditized these days!)
The problem is that the ads are also from Bing — Ecosia doesn't track its users, Bing does.
We also use a ODK-backed system for monitoring, where our partners on the ground fill in surveys about the trees they planted.
Here is another reference: https://info.ecosia.org/about they have a pretty sizable team. Pretty cool!
Super happy that they showed up here (again). And 50M+ trees now, just amazing.
Not sure if this is appreciated on HN (I only saw a guideline about posts, not comments), but if this piqued someone's interest, we have a bunch of open positions at the moment: https://ecosia.workable.com/
However, when I see forestry companies planting trees, they tend to only plant trees that are economically valuable to them. What results are forests with very low biodiversity because these companies have only planted a single type of tree.
How do you ensure that the trees you plant contribute to the health and biodiversity of the forests they are planted in?
This is the same backwards line of thinking that insists non-profit compensation be lower, leading to our best and brightest wasting away spying on people at Facebook instead of optimizing drug delivery out of Dakar.
Until we get over the fact that there isn't anything inherently wrong with capitalism/consumerism, we won't be able to start making it work for our people and planet. Luckily initiatives like the B-corp are beginning to change this mentality.
Because it's a major contributing factor to the situation we're in. It's a perfectly rational response for environmentalists to choose not to support projects like Ecosia that promote consumerism.
You can ra-ra all you want about it, but consumerism isn't going anywhere - so either you work around it, or you accomplish nothing.
"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."
Beneath it is a large button: "DISABLE AD BLOCKER".
To me, a site that wants me to view ads I have no interest in, is promoting consumerism. I realise this applies to a lot of sites, but it's less excusable for a project that touts itself as focusing on the environment. If you don't see a link between advertising and consumerism and the state of our environment, then I guess we look at the world differently.
For my part, I try to encourage friends to install ad blockers, and will not encourage them to visit sites that tell them to disable their ad blockers. I even worked on a page to make detecting and installing an ad blocker as easy as possible: http://blockads.fivefilters.org
There's loads wrong with it though. We only make it work because we patch it up with numerous environmental laws, social safety nets etc
That sounds unlikely to me, its undercutting their own business.
I hadn't heard about YaCy even though I'm in their game. I too run a search engine that doesn't use a link graph for scoring relevance. My bet is on semantic relevance over PageRank, because I think our understanding of language models have become so sophisticated we can start relying on them solely.
Also, it's harder I think to game a language model when compared to a page rank model.
What do you think is lacking from non-link graph search engines?
EDIT: maybe I misunderstood b/c it says here YaCy _has_ a link graph: https://yacy.net/en/API.html
That link graph being referenced is the local nodes one, not a global one. So it only yields links that have been discovered by the node you are sending the request to.
You could send a request to each node individually and aggregate the results, however, you have no way to verify the nodes are being honest without actually crawling those pages yourself.
If I may ask, what is the project that you are working on?
I'm working on a project similar to the YaCy one. The main difference is that I do not want or even require that each node trust each other. I let the user decide who they trust.
Wait! YaCy is a little bit hard to understand. I don't mean that in any way other than in an extremely encouraging way.
What do you mean exactly? A YaCy node will interrogate the "swarm" of data and that interrogation might yield more links compared to if you interrogate another node?
What's that all about?
Esp, the disable personalized results.
In their privacy section they do admit to storing identifiable information for at least 7 days (possibly more) to fight spam and improve search results. They also send user identifiable information to bing, as well, who then store it for at least 4 days. Apart from that, they use third party tools in their non-search parts which might be subject to different privacy rules than their main website.
From their app, they send information to Facebook. They use the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as advertisment providers, if I'm not mistaken.
I encourage you to read the fine print here: https://info.ecosia.org/privacy
Besides that everything I would expect from a search engine probably applies (Microsoft might get to know what I search for etc.).
But taking a little piece of cake away from Google isn't bad either.
Option B : block ads, be less tempted to buy crap you don't need. Save at least 7€ a month this way.
Option C : give 7€ a month to a charity you support
I choose B and C.
I don't understand why smart people think it's great to invest so much effort into redirecting such a tiny portion of ads commissions into planting trees. Just prove your point then ask for money. Please tell me what I'm missing here
Still, they do a great job at finding good and trustworthy planting charities https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002296049-Do... , so their work is really valuable for that.
No thanks. I'll keep using DDG. Planting trees is laudable but free speech is as important to our future as anything.
> If you want to opt out of tracking, you can activate “Do Not Track” in your browser’s settings.
> We don’t create personal profiles of you based on your search history. We actually anonymize all searches within one week.
> We don’t sell your data or your searches to advertising companies.
https://info.ecosia.org/privacy
https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206153381-Where...
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/google-pulls-t...
The problem here is that you are not allowed "incentives to click artificially on sponsored links". And the implied message of "click a link, plant a tree" is clearly and artificial incentive, even though there is a disclaimer no one reads. It makes these clicks less valuable (lower conversion rates), advertisers still pay full price, are unhappy, and because advertisers are the true Google customers they make sure it doesn't happen.
But the question would be: why not make "charity clicks", which advertisers can opt in or out of. The best, if a little evil part: good PR for everyone involved. The "plant a tree" search engine gets to grab people. Advertisers can say they support charity by allowing such lower value clicks to go through and Google can do the same. i.e. for one good action, 3 parties can claim responsibility.
Nice project by the way.
But, the first thing I clicked was the transparency report.
> We publish ... with a delay of 6 weeks ...
But the last report is from October 2018.
Otherwise great stuff, truly inspirational.
One of my search engines ideas is one which eliminates all sites with login/paywalls. Just one which only presents sites which are a joy to browse. Not sure where to get the initial index. (I am bootstrapped, so can't even use common crawl).
If Ecosia are planting Acacia in Spain, as seen in their map, this is wrong. Wattle is invasive in southern Europe. Some are even in the catalogue of forbidden by law species. They displace native species and are a big problem in Portugal after fire forests for example. Some species are also poisonous to cattle and wild animals
Please, left conservation efforts to professionals. They study and train for decades for something. Volunteers can do a lot of harm with the best intentions.
The project in Spain does not plant Acacia trees.
https://www.noticiasdealmeria.com/terminan-los-trabajos-de-p...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/09/berlin-startup...
Also, I'm not sure it's fair to lump them in with well-meaning but ignorant weekend arborist.