Ecosia plants 200 million trees

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."

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.

But they are pretty clear about that. Also, how is that worse than Google or bing? It's not a dream sure, but its a lot better than your money going to Google

Does not sound like a scam.

The build a website, with ads, and donate the revenue.

Can I ask what search engine you would recommend that is not some kind of misleading or a scam

I think your second and third point are well known or at least easily conceivable, but where did you get your first point from? Plain curiosity

I'd rather 'little contribution' than none at all. I'd rather 'every couple of clicks' than none at all. It's not perfect, but it's better than the major alternatives.

What’s your contribution?

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

Same. I wish there was a way to provide settings via a custom URL