Ecosia vs gogle:
I recently found out about a few green search engines that I thought were worth a share here.
Green search engine means you click and save the rainfores. Search advertising is a colossal business that touches pretty much every web user. So a search engine like ecosia that diverts the bulk of the cash raised to protecting a rainforest in northern Brazil looks, like all the best ideas, simple and good.
Ecosia is basically a normal search engine.
Ecosia backed by Yahoo, Bing and the World Wide Fund For Nature, according to the company behind a new search engine dubbed as the world’s greenest. As the homepage says, “Each web search saves about 2 m² of rainforest for free. We already protected 212,427,346 m².” In addition, “all Ecosia servers run on green electricity, so they do not cause any CO2 emissions.” The company said that users could also install Ecosia as their default search engine, adding that once installed it would provide them with a personal record of how much rainforest they have saved by using the search engine. Ecosia has been quick to label the new search engine as the world’s greenest, but it enters into an increasingly crowded green search sector where a number of organisations are attempting to convert sponsored links into revenue for environmental projects.
My Opinions about Ecosia:
The idea of Ecosia is undoubtedly great, saving the rain forrest with every search. The question for every interwebs-master arises, how relevant are the search results and is the promise actually true? Does Ecosia really have “impeccable ecological credentials”?
Ecosia basically just Bing, a Microsoft’s engine. Well, its a partnership with Bing where by Ecosia get a very vague “very high percentage” of ad revenue generated, the rest going to Bing /i.e. Microsoft. All the money going to good causes come from people clicking on ads, which people like me, who have sensibly installed adblock software often don’t even see. They give 80% of their proceeds (the commission they make from the ads, after paying a cut to Bing, i.e. Microsoft) to WWF rainforest protection efforts.
I ask that you only use Ecosia when you actually want to search for something and only click on the ads that you are truly interested in. Artificial searches use unnecessary energy and harm not only the environment, but also Ecosia. Ecosia filters out all artificial ad clicks and reserves the right to block the IP addresses of these users.The small part of the energy involved in your search that Ecosia use to serve the results pages is brought from the German co-operative company Greenpeace Energy (who are a bit like Ecotricity in that they both buy and build renewables, but are also a co-operative which is nice). Its good that they buy their energy from such a supplier.
So the questions is Ecosia better/equal to Google, is it really true that they save the rainforest.?
Ecosia claims to donate 0.13 Cent per search to save our rain forest. It’s typical that businesses try to adopt a green-label. Ecosia in fact uses green energy to power their servers, however Yahoo and Bing do not. That means that the main computing power originating in the search process comes from fossil fuels. Furthermore it can be doubted whether 0.13 cent save a square meter of rain forest.
Can I support Ecosia by conducting many searches and clicking on ads often? No.
1.Most of the energy is still used by the Bing servers powering ecosia and we can’t tell how much energy these use because Microsoft don’t tell us. Bing’s and yahoo engine algorithms are worse. No one want to end up digging through Viagra results on every keyword.
2.Just using Ecosia does not help direct money to WWF in any way. Only clicking on ads does, they explicitly state that you should not just do searches and click ads for the sake of it – these are just filted out and not counted.Lastly it needs to be said that Ecosia claims to store the data collected during using the website for maximum up to 48 hours.
How about Google? Monetizing the visitors by showing guests is the best way of making information available freely across borders. The questions are: is Google Evil?, how good is the search?
Google Invests in German Solar Power Plant. The U.S. Internet service provider Gogle now wants to be active in Europe in the market for renewable energy sources. Google last year announced plans to invest in the U.S. in wind turbines. The Brandenburg photovoltaic power plant is Google’s first power project outside the United States. More than 70 percent of installed solar panels in Brandenburg were from German production. Google Invests in Solar Tower Power Plant in California, put 168 million dollars in a project to build a solar tower power plant in California’s Mojave Desert. Until the day this was the biggest investment in this area.
Solar tower power plants work with computer-controlled heliostats, the movable mirror position to follow the sun and reflect sunlight onto a central tower. On the resulting heat generates steam, which in turn drives a turbine to produce electricity. BrightSource Energy projected the plant Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System to 392 megawatts. It is according to the data from Google, the largest project of its kind, it will use 173 000 heliostats, each with two mirrors. Google Invests in Oregon Wind Farm. Google put $ 100 million in a wind energy park in the U.S. state of Oregon as of April 2011. The wind farm in Oregon is to be the largest in the world and deliver 845 megawatts, enough electricity for more than 235,000 households. Overall construction costs amount to $ 2 billion. Other investors include the U.S. industrial giant General Electric, which also supplies the turbines. The new project has boosted Google claims to its recent investments in renewable energy to over 350 million U.S. dollars.
Google is working towards a clean energy future in a variety of ways: They working on developing utility scale renewable energy cheaper than coal and accelerating the commercialization of plug-in vehicles through the RechargeIT project. However, electricity from renewable sources today is generally more expensive than coal-fired generation – currently the predominant source of energy worldwide, and a large contributor to global warming pollution.
Ecosia estimate that its probably about the same as a Google search (which we do know, because Google measure such stuff – and help others to do so). But its likely to be more, because Google’s data centres apparently use about half of similar facilities.
Anyway, Ecosia assume it is about the same as Google and then “offset” this amount with Pure. Pure are quite good as far as “offset” people go – at least they are a charity not obviously just trying to cash in. They also cancel their carbon credits instead of selling them, another plus.
“In simple terms, a business or individual pays to have the same amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere as they have generated. This in effect cancels out the CO2 produced from an activity or lifestyle choice. ”That is simply not true. It is just not possible to “cancel out” CO2 already emitted by offsetting. And anyway, Google has been a “carbon neutral” company since late 2007. They’ve also invested over $100 million in renewable energy. That is a fair bit more €125k that Ecosia has raised in its first year (although that has no doubt helped a bit to protect forests, a laudable aim).
The search giant Google Inc. invests considerable amounts of money and calculating capacity to make their products more eco-friendly. Google is not shy when it comes to invest it’s calculating capacities and money to strengthen renewable energy initiatives. In April 2011, they have invested a total of 250 million U.S. dollars in environmentally friendly power production.
Google does store your search data. They do that on every site with ads or just analytics installed. The goal is to develop a perfect user profile for showing as relevant ads as possible. Google Advanced Algorithms, more relevant. The search results are awesome within around 62.5% market share. Of course, they want revenue, however, more relevant ads also means better quality for us. No longer those annoying casino ads or anything. I don’t care much about my data being stored anonymously. In exchange I get the best web services for free.
Despite their many imperfections, provide superior tools and do lots of Good Stuff like supporting open source/ free software projects – and free software is the foundation upon which we can build the community money and media systems that will make debt-slavery and corporate propaganda obsolete.
