Ecocho

» see ecocho.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ecocho was a search box with a promise bolted onto it. You typed a query and got back ordinary web results, and the site said it was putting 70 percent of the advertising money into carbon offset credits bought through tree planting in New South Wales. The arithmetic was printed on the front page: for every 1,000 searches, two trees, which Ecocho said covered a ton of greenhouse gases. It launched on 14 April 2008 at ecocho.com.au, owned by the Found Agency.

The results came from Google, and so did the ads, which is where the whole thing came apart. On 22 April, eight days in, Google told Ecocho it was being denied the use of its search technology for repeated policy violations. Google Australia's Rob Shilkin put the rule plainly to the press: AdSense does not let a site compensate users for running searches, or promise compensation to a third party for that behavior, and promising to plant trees is promising compensation.

Ecocho survived the week. By the end of April the front page carried a "Powered By" line pointing at Yahoo instead, and the site ran on Yahoo's results for another three and a half years. The design stayed green and the counter on the front page kept going up.

~ the record ~

~ the counter on the front page ~

The counter is the only hard number this site ever published, and the archive preserved it by accident, because it was rendered by a script with the totals in the URL. On 30 April 2008 the page claimed 4,009 trees and 2,004,771 kilos of CO2. On 17 June it claimed 5,255 trees and 2,627,874 kilos. At the advertised rate of two trees per thousand queries, that is about 2.6 million searches in the first two months, and roughly 1,250 trees added across seven weeks.

Nobody outside the company checked any of it. The site had a "How we're verified" link and a page explaining the offset scheme, but it never published how many searches it had served.

~ the arithmetic ~

Michael Arrington had got to the vagueness two days after launch, in a TechCrunch post whose entire argument was one line of logic: the marketing said "up to two trees" per thousand searches, and zero trees is within the definition of up to two. The promise was structured so that it could not fail.

~ the country list ~

The front page carried national versions in a column down the left side: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Turkey is not on that list. Eco-search did reach here eventually, as Ecosia, which launched in December 2009 and still runs, on an advertising deal it kept.

The last time ecocho.com.au served its own homepage was 7 December 2011, still green and still counting. By 18 January 2012 the domain was answering with a parking template, its title split into two meaningless words.

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