• 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.