Ecosia – A search engine that plants trees

That phenomenon is called counter-signaling, which I first ran into listening to Dan Jurafsky making the point that if a menu uses the word "fresh", its a low-brow restaurant. A high-brow restaurant would never use the word "fresh" -- the freshness is implicit in the other signals.

https://kelley.iu.edu/riharbau/cs-randfinal.pdf

"People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response."

You imply that a website that does not mention tree planting at all, plants the most trees. Interesting.

What would you recommend people to put on their website when they genuinely would want to provide a search engine that plants trees?

Do you imply matrix.org being a protocol for closed islands for insecure, centralized silence instead of a protocol for an open network for secure, decentralized communication?

Please start finding actual arguments instead of spreading superficial unfounded commentary.

I’ve always found the “we value your privacy” an interesting _admission_. They definitely put a _value_ on your privacy by selling it! They exactly what other are willing to pay for it.

But to be honest Parler is also going into this basket, they also overstate freedom of speech, which is in the long run practically impossible for any centralized service especially for those operated in the USA.

I don’t believe any particular company cares about anything other than maximizing their profit.

Rights = Duties

You lose your freedom of assembly if you use it to form mobs with the objective of perpetrating crimes.

You lose your freedom of speech if you use it to form unlawful assemblies with the objective of perpetrating crimes.

Trump was banned because he sent a mob of Q-indoctrinated lunatics to the Capitol with the likely objective of kidnapping senators and staging a coup (they were photographed carrying zip-tie handcuffs in Senate chambers).

It was a good idea to ban Trump, let's keep it that way. He rarely said anything of value anyways, only reality show trash talk, hate speech and pseudoscience.

> “ We value freedom of speech." (proceed to literally ban the president, wrong opinions and alternative apps like Parler)”

Saying this is not open-mindedness or support for free speech.

The president and Parler both have acted as direct, unequivocal instruments of fomenting and directing violence, especially with racist and fascist nature.

Banning them from any platforms is in no way connected to free speech whatsoever. President Trump’s Twitter account and Free Speech are two completely disconnected, unrelated concepts.

It requires fascism-sympathizing and racism-sympathizing to even suggest otherwise.

At this point, anything of the vein like, “Banning Trump from Twitter is unfair censorship” or “Banning Parler from app stores is unfair censorship” is just hate speech disguised as if it’s an attempt to uphold freedom.

Just went directly to Ecosia's search page and disable tracking protection.

This appears to be accurate.

Microsoft 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.

Ecosia also does that

Thanks, I get where you're coming from (that: privacy absolutists tend to throw the baby out with the bath water) but you misunderstand the point I was making. My gripe is with their claim that they protect privacy. If you're going to store user-data as-is for 7 days even if anonymized later and stored forever (for some definition of "anonymization", which is not a trivial thing to do), it doesn't come close to "protecting" anything.

I don't have a horse in this fight, but I do build FOSS anti-surveillance / anti-censorship apps, and take offense at such misleading messaging.

> It's very important to remember the legal and liability requirements associated with privacy policies.

Why isn't it important to not mislead with headlines and FAQs?

> Therefor, the default is to over-report.

Wouldn't have to if one really took measures to "protect privacy" but when one can't / don't / won't ... then one may at least have the courtesy to be upfront about it.

> Nor does it mean they do not take privacy very seriously.

They claim to "protect your privacy". Their words, not mine. But the fine-print doesn't inspire confidence, even if written in CMA-style (though, that's a lame excuse). Or as they say, why not put money where your mouth is.

> That's why it's highly unfair to Ecosia for OP to so strongly imply they lie (or are, at best, misleading and hypocritical) and use your data nefariously, simply by excerpting a few lines of the Privacy Policy.

Thanks but it is not I that's hypocritical. You have it the other way around, I am afraid.

> italicized "may"s,

Here's the clause: "The anonymised data is saved for as long as is necessary for the evaluation. The data is not transferred to any third party. We will not access your data located outside of the app, such as your calendar, photos, messages or such like unless you have permitted us to do so."

> Suggesting that any product that collects data to run the business...

You're extrapolating the critique to the entire world, which you can, but you then don't get to dismiss it for one entity just because "the rest of the world can't survive without data collection". Ecosia may not need personal data to be running a viable tech business (which at its core is a wrapper on top of Bing with ad revenue going to afforestation efforts).

> ...good people do to craft a viable balance in today's difficult tech ecosystem.

Like someone else suggested in this thread: Just because you plant trees, you don't suddenly have a claim to being an "angel". Ecosia may have good people behind them or not, but I do care about honesty and earnestness.

Also, I write FOSS software full-time, do I qualify for your "good people" list? :D

DDG uses Bing too. Nothing wrong with that.

Thank you, I was about to point that out as well. Ecosia advertises with "we plant trees" because that is what people understand and want to hear. Under the hood, there is a lot more going on. Ecosia does not only support one but multiple projects with a variety of goals, including reforestation, preservation etc. What's also nice is the fact that their are extremely transparent about their finances. They are a registered non profit in Germany and they frequently publish their finances and other insights, which is always extremely interesting

They use data tools that I helped initiate to keep track of their work. Here is on dashboard I found. https://ecosia.akvolumen.org/s/2H9C92aluRg

>According to tons of leading economists, we can make a steadily rising fee on carbon emissions economically sustainable and politically viable by returning the net revenue from the fee to households as carbon dividends.

Anyone who did a little research knows that a market based solution like carbon taxes is going to solve the problem very effectively. The concept is very simple. Calculate how much damage a ton of CO2 is causing and tax companies so that they pay for the damage they caused. In some cases it is easier to treat the damage. In others it is easier to reduce the damage. The market gets to decide what is most efficient.

The problem is that there are lots of people who are not deep in the subject who believe that it is just a money grab or that if you are going to give them the money back they would prefer no taxation in the first place.

This has lead to Germany introducing a carbon price instead of a carbon tax. The difference? You're not getting your money back. People's allergy to taxes backfired. Kind of ironic.

Taxing CO2 emissions of imports is another problem. You would have to introduce tariffs to nudge big foreign polluters to implement their own CO2 tax.

That obviously depends with what happens with the trees that could not have been preserved. If you burn a tree you set almost it's entire absorbed CO2 free. On the other hand, a recently planted tree has absorbed almost nothing - it will take decades if not longer to grow to a big one - reaching the level of absorbed CO2 of the other tree before it has been burned.

Nevertheless, a tree at the place of an older one can help binding CO2 when the old tree is used such that the CO2 is not released to the atmopshere, such as for a well-crafted table (which could be used for decades, too). But don't forget that it usually is not just removing one tree - usually big areas are cut out, which includes the huge ecosystems around trees in untouched nature.

Though, always keep in mind, this is not a choice. The goal should be to preserve as much as possible (especially untouched ecosystems) as well as planting as much as possible.

There's more to climate change than CO2... Forests create micro climates; prevent soil erosion; help fixate water and nutrients; produce food for local populations, thus providing them income and reducing need to ship as much food to rural areas; improve yields of agriculture, so you don't need to water as much, or use as much ferilizer... And Ecosia is invested is projects to help with all of this (read their blog).

This single track kindset of climate change fight is why we get so much green washing.

CO2 isn't the only reason to take care of forests. If we replace a naturally grown forests with newly planted one we destroy an existing thriving habitat and replace it, in most cases, with a monoculture. This has tragic impact on biodiversity.

Here's a good article you might want to read. It also says that natural forests are actually better at capturing CO2.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01026-8

That'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.

Old 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-...

You're absolutely right, but here's a counter point of view. People are not more likely to use Ecosia and click ads than they are to use Google and click ads. Ecosia is trying to give you a "greener" option to something you will do anyway.

If I could legitimately help stop or reverse ecological damage to the planet by clicking ads, I would do it all day.

Trees 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.

When you search on DDG, it sends it to bing via their servers. Bing doesnt know you are searching, it can only see duckduckgo and the search term, not you.

DDG gets results back from bing, sometimes modifying it with it's own results to make them better.

> But I think you're talking about which index it is that DDG queries internally to yield regular (non-bang) search results?

Yes. Most of it is Bing.

Ecosia doesn't proxy it properly. It sends it to bing from you browser, not from Ecosia's servers. Bing knows your IP and sets cookies to track you. You can observe it with dev tools.

They might have changed it since I last checked.

>"...it doesn't proxy at all, you are literally redirected to Google and it doesn't add anything. "

If you are looking for proxied Google results, your main options are Runnaroo [0] and Startpage [1].

I'm the creator of Runnaroo, and I prefer it to Startpage (and also DDG, but that is another thread).

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/

[1] https://www.startpage.com/

Yeah, I think they were talking about the index, and I'm not sure that's true any more. I don't remember the sources, but I remember reading that DDG started relying more on their own indexing and less on Bing about a year ago. And from some testing I did some time ago, it was the case that only 50-60% of the search results on DDG were similar to Bing - meaning it's still a significant source, but not so much as to say DDG is just proxying requests.

DDG 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.

If 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

Thank 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 :)

Hi. We are not making money yet so no reports to show -- but I agree a 404 is a terrible way to explain that. Will fix, thanks.

Hi, good catch. I have answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25724252

As 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?

no point in using it if you block ads?

Indeed, 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

Ok, added.

I show a short info about each engine. What would be a good info line for Mojeek? What makes it unique?

The styling does not seem to properly handle mobile. I get clipped content on the start page and horizontal scroll on the search results.

Thanks for the information. Going to give Mojeek a try.

I mostly use Google

I'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.

depends

Haha, 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.

Of course that only works if there is no competition that is more efficient.