Can we… see them?
Edit: some quick math, the minimum recommended space between trees is 3m, 200 million of those is 600km² / 148k ac , which would make the space required bigger than 17 countries (larger than Andorra but very slightly smaller than Saint Lucia). They have a blog with their tree planting updates but I wish there were more photos.
The big turning point came in 2018 when I signed a legally binding commitment to ensure that Ecosia could never be sold and that 100% of our profits would always go to the planet. Today, your searches enable us to work with partners to plant and protect 1,250 species of trees across 95,000 locations globally.
Keywords plant and protect. Basically a papermill can plant trees to harvest 20 years later and in the meantime sell carbon offsets for 19 years then harvest and replant.
Can’t say for sure they’re doing it, but from what I hear just about every tree is eligible for a “carbon offset” and some companies abuse it by saying “this is our tree” as long as it’s not cut down within x months and use it as a carbon offset or a “protected tree.”
Ecosia doesn’t sell carbon credits though.
They might buy them though to inflate the number of protected trees. I’m not saying they are, just providing a potential reason for such a large number
My understanding from reading their posts is that the counter only counts planted trees. Other things like building solar panels and fight deforestation are not even counted like that. That’s why they said they are phasing out the individual tree counter, because it doesn’t account for all those other things.
They integrated AI chat which is using OpenAI technology. So they’re paying for ChatGPT API instead of spending this money on trees? And doesn’t running generative AI consume a lot of electricity?
We have estimated the carbon footprint of our AI chatbot and according to our first estimates it does not significantly increase the overall carbon footprint of Ecosia. The estimate takes into account that Ecosia searches are already 200% carbon negative,as we produce twice as much energy as is consumed by our search engine. We are currently working with two universities to refine our carbon footprint assessment.
Unfortunately the more important issue is that the leading language AI model providers are still not transparent about the energy consumption of their models, so without this clarity we can only make rough estimations of our impact. We will continue to monitor our energy usage and urge leading AI companies to do the same and be transparent about their impact.
(https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/534-ecosia-chat-ai)
I am not against it. I don’t want to miss out on AI to support this search engine. It’s quite helpful to me, and I assume many others. I think this search engine should compete with other search engines so that more users use it. I am already a fan of their Ecosia Chat; the interface is fast and the responses are even faster. Bing Chat is just awful; it’s slow both in terms of interface and text generation
Running AI doesn’t - training an AI is where the real power hungry stuff happens
I’d like to try using this, but I like to search by “all regions” and it won’t ever save my preferences in Fennec
I’m usually connected to a VPN, so it incorrectly auto-detects my region, and also I just don’t like the idea that results are being served based on regional trends and interests
Same. I wish there was a way to provide settings via a custom URL
Yes! That’s how I do it with Mojeek, which is my current search engine of choice
I miss their old app logo