
Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees - kawera
https://www.ecosia.org/
======
kaycebasques
I was investigating massive reforestation as a means of reducing greenhouse
gases a few days ago. I stumbled upon this hyper-dense technique called the
Miyawaki method [1]. Sounds like it's resource-intensive upfront but might be
self-sustaining after that. The guy mentioned in [1] has open-sourced the
methodology here [2].

[1]: [https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-
real...](https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-really-
fast-d27df202ba09)

[2]:
[https://www.afforestt.com/methodology](https://www.afforestt.com/methodology)

~~~
wishinghand
I first read this article when it was linked on Hacker News. I had always
hoped the method would go viral for local environmentalists, hippies, rich
landscapers, and Earth/Arbor day organizers.

~~~
CalRobert
Planted my first trees a few weeks ago. 2 more acres to go (more if I can buy
more land...)

~~~
pvaldes
Feel free to ask if you encounter a problem. Now is the best month to plant a
tree in the northern hemisphere.

~~~
CalRobert
Also, what can I plant to hopefully enjoy a nice small forest to walk in in
about 8-12 years? What fruit trees would work? (I already have some apple
trees). Can I get away with planting seeds or do I need saplings? Will trees
effectively stop large undergrowth to the point where I can walk around?

I'm already in my mid-30's, will I be able to enjoy this for any reasonable
portion of my life?

~~~
pvaldes
> what can I plant

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).

------
edmundsauto
Wow, this is one of the better attempts to monetize an environmentalists'
identity. This could literally be a wrapper around bing/google, very little
investment. Build out the tree-planting department as you scale income,
without having to solve the hard technical problems at all.

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!)

~~~
foxhop
It wraps bing. This is the 2nd time I've come across Ecosia, today I added the
add-on to Firefox. Here's to hoping they actually plant the trees!

~~~
derdot
Not sure my word is going to mean much, but yes, we do indeed plant these
trees :) We also publish regular tree updates to make the impact more visible
(latest one is here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeBhY5m9npE&](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeBhY5m9npE&))
and just now some of my colleagues are in Indonesia:
[https://www.facebook.com/ecosia/videos/1056643057857650/](https://www.facebook.com/ecosia/videos/1056643057857650/)

We also use a ODK-backed system for monitoring, where our partners on the
ground fill in surveys about the trees they planted.

------
odiroot
I was working at Ecosia in 2014, the position on my CV that makes me the most
proud.

Super happy that they showed up here (again). And 50M+ trees now, just
amazing.

~~~
derdot
I only started at Ecosia in 2016, but I feel you.

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/](https://ecosia.workable.com/)

~~~
justaguyhere
Are there any resources to find companies that give back their profits to
society, especially to environment?

------
mykowebhn
I think this is a great idea.

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?

------
benj111
So they get paid by users clicking on ads. But I don't click on ads. Am I
costing them money, or just failing to earn them money? What's the deal with
Microsoft, is a cut of profits, or pay per 1000 searches?

~~~
k1m
I don't recommend Ecosia for this reason. You have to expose yourself to ads
and click on them for Ecosia to make money. An environmental project that
encourages and depends on consumerism isn't something that I want to be part
of.

~~~
zeropnc
This is a very shortsighted and unrealistic way of thinking. Consumerism is
core to how our society functions and isn't going away - why should social
good and environmentalism fly in contrast to it?

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.

~~~
k1m
> Consumerism is core to how our society functions and isn't going away - why
> should social good and environmentalism fly in contrast to it?

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.

~~~
zeropnc
Ecosia isn't "promoting consumerism". It's simply accepting the reality of it
and helping mitigate/counterbalance the damage. There's a key difference
there.

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.

~~~
k1m
It's a search engine that makes money from advertising. That's essentially its
core business model. I browse with uBlock Origin enabled so I don't see ads. A
search on Ecosia shows me a large banner 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."

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](http://blockads.fivefilters.org)

------
freedomben
It says "Powered by Microsoft" on the bottom of a search results page. Is this
just a wrapper around bing?

~~~
greglindahl
Pretty much every search box you see on the Internet is a wrapper around
Google or bing, with Yandex as a distant 3rd and a few country-specific
engines in China, Russia, Korea, etc.

~~~
viraptor
There's also yacy which is the distributed search effort. Tiny by size, but
worth mentioning.

~~~
thekyle
I really like YaCy (I run a node), but a big problem with it that will prevent
it from ever competing with Google/Bing is the lack of a verifiable link graph
for ranking results. Right now it basically just uses full text search and a
local link graph which is problematic.

~~~
misterman0
>> the lack of a verifiable link graph

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](https://yacy.net/en/API.html)

~~~
thekyle
> maybe I misunderstood b/c it says here YaCy _has_ a link graph:
> [https://yacy.net/en/API.html](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?

~~~
misterman0
Ic. Thx!

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.

[https://github.com/kreeben/resin](https://github.com/kreeben/resin)

------
dotcoma
Givero also gives back to various good causes

[https://www.givero.com/](https://www.givero.com/)

------
byteface
Who owns the land you're planting on?. How can you guarantee it won't be used
in the future? Companies that cause pollution should also pay a tax to repair
it. This should be enforced at a government level. Maybe by UN? seeing as the
environment is something countries share despite their political ideologies.
It's sad we can't hold governments more accountable for false promises. I
remember all the g8 summits 10+ years ago politicians back slapping and saying
we'd fix this and that by 2020. Everything seems worse no? Also internet
searches cost energy? Is this just offsetting? Good to hear it may be working,
51mil trees is quite a claim. I laughed this off last time I saw it as there's
always someone making money of charities. It sounds like a false economy to me
which you can't accurately measure results. But any effort is better than none
I guess.

~~~
derdot
I linked this a different comment:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ld0EDDQZg4&](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ld0EDDQZg4&)
This is our tree planting officer explaining (among other things) how he tries
to make sure we plant in the right places (and that includes land ownership
questions and how to make sure the tress will still be around in a few years).
As for energy consumption, we do offset the CO2 emissions that are associated
with searching on Ecosia by running our own solar power plant. Here is some
more information on this on our blog: [https://blog.ecosia.org/co2-neutral-
seach-engine-ecosia-sola...](https://blog.ecosia.org/co2-neutral-seach-engine-
ecosia-solar-plant/)

~~~
tixocloud
Thanks for sharing. I’m curious to know how we would align our company to a
social initiative such as this and would be curious to know if other things
are sacrificed to have a decent amount of profit to pay for tree-planting?

------
lecarore
Option A : see ads in your search every day, help plant one tree every 2
years.

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

~~~
le_zonzon
I actually do the same, it is much faster to simply give money to Ecosia
partners. You can go as low as 0.10$ a tree with some of them.

Still, they do a great job at finding good and trustworthy planting charities
[https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/115002296049-Do...](https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/115002296049-Does-Ecosia-accept-donations-) , so their work is
really valuable for that.

------
chiara87
Not sure how sustainable their business model is and I'm not a fan of Bing,
but they are a decent bunch of people who have hired devs with unusual
backgrounds (like me) and support the tech community over here by hosting a
lot of meetups. I started using their search engine after going to some of
these events :)

------
fdsa_fdsaj_eee
Appears to censor searches even with "Safe Search" set to "Off". I admittedly
searched for some very offensive (though not illegal) things, but that was the
whole point.

No thanks. I'll keep using DDG. Planting trees is laudable but free speech is
as important to our future as anything.

------
commoner
Ecosia claims to respect the Do Not Track header. Even for users who don't use
DNT, Ecosia offers a stronger privacy policy than Bing (which supplies the
search results).

> 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://info.ecosia.org/privacy)

[https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/206153381-Where...](https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/206153381-Where-do-Ecosia-s-search-results-come-from-)

~~~
b_tterc_p
I quite like the idea of allowing advertisers to create profiles, but only
with one week of data. I would support that as a regulatory constraint. You
might get the same basic results analytically, but it feels less invasive to
know that if I don’t want something to be known, it’ll be gone in a week.

------
pvaldes
It seems that they started trying a partnership with google but it was
unsuccessful.

[https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/google-
pulls-t...](https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/google-pulls-the-
plug-on-eco-friendly-search-engine-forestle/)

~~~
GuB-42
I understand Google stance but I think they should have made a bit more
effort.

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.

------
hjek
Trees good. Ads bad.

------
Anbelly
Lovely project. Incredibly smart idea on how to monetize a search engine.

------
techaddict009
@OP Wanted to know whose search result you use. I mean whose search data it
is. I dont think you guys might have built a whole search engine for this?
(Just curious)

Nice project by the way.

~~~
ealhad
Both search and ads are from Bing.

------
michaco33
I love it.

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.

~~~
pun5
For whatever reason the last two transparency reports were only published in
their blog. This is the most recent one: [https://blog.ecosia.org/december-
ecosia-financial-report/](https://blog.ecosia.org/december-ecosia-financial-
report/)

~~~
michaco33
I should not have expected it to be with all the other financial reports.
Totally my bad. Thank you!

------
3into10power5
Looks like a wrapper around Bing? Microsoft has an API to do that or this is a
custom business relationship between them?

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).

------
GrryDucape
This is the best way to monetize my searches. And it's so good for whole
planet!

------
Wyndtroy2012
I hope that you pay to people who plant trees.

------
pvaldes
The big question here is _" what trees?"_

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.

~~~
SiempreViernes
If you scroll down a screen you will see a slideshow with information about
the actual projects, not just a map with a logo indicating where the projects
take place.

The project in Spain does not plant Acacia trees.

~~~
pvaldes
Pinus, Juniperus, Quercus and Rhamnus,... okay, that's much better.

[https://www.noticiasdealmeria.com/terminan-los-trabajos-
de-p...](https://www.noticiasdealmeria.com/terminan-los-trabajos-de-
plantacion-en-la-solana-de-la-muela)

