Yesterday I have seen an ad on YouTube about this project
https://www.ecosia.org/
I am not sure if this is an honest attempt of doing something good for the environment or a smart way to make money.
When you do a search, you are shown around 7/8 ads and they state "On average you need around 45 searches to plant a tree!". Also, the simple display of ads is not the real money maker, but the actual click is.
This project is on since 2009 and as of today they claim to have planted over 17 million trees.
This is how an ex employee of Ecosia replied to somebody on Quora to the question "Is Ecosia better for the environment than Google?"
(you can see the full topic here https://www.quora.com/Is-Ecosia-better-for-the-environment-than-Google)
One of the thing that come out from the information found in the forums, is that, obviously, Ecosia tries to discredit the competitors, saying, for example, that google is not green (false) and similar. The funniest thing is that they also discredit bing, that it is actually what they use for the search engine.
I hope I am just being very critical towards them and that in reality they are a honest project.
What's your view?
