I'm quite hesitant to use Ecosia. This whole planting trees while searching sounds good, but if we are honest, it only works if I disable my ad blocker and occasionally click on the ads being shown. And this is something I really do not want to do. And if I use Ecosia with an ad blocker, I'm kind of planting negative trees because I'm only producing costs and no revenue.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Not true!
The ads are sponsored results they feed through their own domain (bypasses blocking) at the top of the result page, and they themselves encourage you not to click them unless you otherwise would. They get the money for the sponsored result either way.
I’ve been using ecosia for quite a while now, with a pihole and/or ublock (depending on computer config) and never clicking sponsored links. Its very doable.
I checked again: uBlock Origin totally does block the "sponsored results".
I tried to find the info you talk about in https://www.ecosia.org/ but for some reason I didn't mange to do so. Could you share a link where they say these things?
And, the search results are crap. As bad as Google has gotten, it’s better than Bing/DDG/Ecosia.
You can choose Google as your source in Ecosia
That's the sticking point. I use NoAI DDG as my main engine, but I keep having to go back to Alphabet.
Try kagi. Seriously. You can try it for free.
I'm not interested in supporting paid search, or being subscribed to a search engine with a "try it". So, no thank you.
I'd rather pay for a product than be the product. But do as you please.
I have a choice - pay for that, or pay for food, clothes, shelter, and the esoterica of existence - including debts that I got myself into stupidly because I trusted someone I should not have. There's no amount of the money I need to live which I'm willing to expend on that.
This is HUGE news!! This is the kind of stuff that gives me hope.
Cool! How many are still alive? Who cares how many they planted? How many are alive?
This is constantly monitored and adapted. For example in Tanzania, they had 8 sites targeted for reforestation. 5 of them were healthy and growing with a high survival rate, but 3 of them ended up needing additional diversity to thrive.
They also don't plant the trees themselves, but work with local groups such as women's collectives, and partner with other organizations for the ongoing monitoring of survival and growth. 44moles (german company) is one partner I know of that provides ongoing monitoring, along with kanop.io.
The groups they work with are posted in their blog, which may have more information.
That said - monitoring is a more recent (past year or so) effort, so data is going to be limited. You'd need to wait longer for detailed information on survival rates.
I get where you're coming from, but I don't entirely agree. We don't need to measure everything by a success rate or a KPI. Even trees that don't thrive can leave behind root systems that retain better soil and whole ecosystems that can make it better for the next tree there.
Yeah, even if a tree just dies after a while, there will still some biomass (and therefore carbon) get sequestered into the ground, therefore permanently removed from the atmosphere, which is more effective than our own carbon sequestering efforts by... infinity percent, iirc.
Nothing that's, say, less than 100 m below ground is permanently removed from the atmosphere, especially not roots.
Yeah, but it starts there! ... i wanted to be positive about something for once, goddamnit grml grml sob sob
But what if I could make good thing bad thing?
I've started using Ecosia after years of using DuckDuckGo. I find that the results are better. DDG has been slipping (and I used NoAI version), giving me way too many LLM-generated sites and putting the actual stuff I want way down the list (or on the second page). I haven't had the same issues with Ecosia. It's not perfect, but I've become a fan.