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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

I don't care for companies that resell search results provided by another company. Bing! is okay, Yahoo, Ecosia and any of these other middlemen in the world of search I just don't have any incentive to use or reason to trust them.

I am sure the work Ecosia does is commendable but reselling search engine results is not going to plant enough trees to save the planet. It might provide their founders with a comfortable salary plus an ego-boost for do-gooding but I might as well do my Christmas shopping from The Hunger Site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Site) for the good it does.

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If you want to make a service with positive environmental impact and positive financials, you have to start somewhere.

The place you start is likely to be close to your expertise. In Ecosia's case, it could scale massively and they could replace the search stack with their own as the business grows.

Until a carbon tax is implemented, most businesses trying to have a positive environmental impact will be hard pressed to find financial stability.

> The place you start is likely to be close to your expertise.

What is their "expertise", though? Being an effective search engine requires expertise in search. If Ecosia is going to outsource that entirely to a third party, like Bing... what does that make them an expert at? Donating to charity?

Yeah, it should be mentioned when you select the default search engine. I fear the common consumer will default to Google for lack of better understanding of what the other options provide and those consumers are by far the great majority. At least a door is opened.

Especially if they're only going to present four options, they really should allow each company to list a small blurb to go under their title. It's likely Ecosia would vastly increase it's market share if given this option... and largely why I'm not surprised Google isn't offering such a blurb in the screenshot.

This article also quoted DuckDuckGo and Qwant, which are search aggregators and not just pass-through.

I agree, Ecosia isn't a compelling alternative. It's the same business model as Credo Wireless and various do-good credit cards. Good for them for speaking up though.

If you want to plant trees you could always pass your savings from Bing rewards onto a direct charitable donation.

I'm only a moderate Bing user but still get like $10/mo in rewards.

That is pure ad-hominem. You are not engaging with the argument being made, you are attacking it solely based on who is making it.

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