Ecosia: Green Search Engine for Afforestation

I. Introduction

The Ecosia.org search engine is a new way to plant trees using the power of the
internet. Their business model is straightforward: donate 80% of their profits to tree planting
projects and reforestation programs. They compensate users by planting trees in response to
their searches. Consider them an ecological Google, Bing, or Yahoo, through which users may
access and explore the internet in the same way as they would normally.

The company was founded by Christian Kroll with the primary aim of mobilizing
ecological marketing to aid reforestation projects around the world. Its main operations are
based in Berlin, Germany since the time of its founding in December 2009 until present.

With every forty-five (45) searches made, a tree is planted which approximately only
takes 0.8 to 19 seconds. Having more than fifteen (15) million users with seven hundred-twenty
(720) thousand searches per day, Ecosia has successfully planted over one hundred-twenty-
nine (129) million trees around the world since 2009.

By planting trees and offsetting its energy use with renewables, each search
with Ecosia actually removes 1 kg of CO2 from the air, which makes Ecosia a carbon-negative
search engine.

The creation of Ecosia was driven by the increasing need to mobilize finance for
restoration. The concept of using internet searches for this purpose is an ingenious strategy
especially with the continuously growing usages that the internet can offer. While as a search
engine in itself, Ecosia may not give the most excellent performance among others when it
comes to more advanced searching, Ecosia still gives satisfactory performance and is a
recommended tool for regular searching activities because each user’s search will be of great
help not only in offsetting carbon emissions and aiding forest restoration but also to the
socioeconomic development of Ecosia’s supported areas for reforestation projects.

Points:
Ecosia follows a timely and progressive environmental outlook making it the
most environmentally friendly search engine to use thus far

As of now, Google has the most number of users, but it isn’t exactly the most
sustainable option (Valeviciute, 2020). At the minimum, Google hasn’t done anything
purposeful to the environment, unlike Ecosia, which has done several tree-planting
projects over the years.

Ecosia’s partnership with Bing (a search engine owned by Microsoft) may seem
contradictory because Ecosia’s objectives and Microsoft’s operation do not complement
each other since Microsoft uses only 50% renewable energy and some lower than 40%
in other parts of the world, according to some sources online. In a way, this means that
they’re partly using non-renewable energy to run their search engine operations, which
is seemingly counterproductive.

However, Ecosia alone runs on 200% renewable energy, meaning they produce
twice as much renewables and eliminate more carbon than they produce through every
search. As with Microsoft, they plan to commit to an operation powered by 100%
renewable energy by 2025 and ultimately eliminate all the carbon they have ever
produced since then. Ergo, it is safe to say that their partnership can’t be principally
perceived as some juxtaposition.

Ecosia has done incredibly in taking initiatives to help sustain the environment.
Not only have they planted more than 129 million trees since their operation, but they
also have a long-term goal to plant more than one billion trees in the near future. Ergo,
if put under the context of being the most environmentally friendly search engine,
Ecosia is undoubtedly the one to utilize.
Search security and User Privacy in Ecosia is better than other major search
engines.

On a functional level, Ecosia's browser is similar to other popular browsers. It has

many of the same features, but Ecosia does outperform Google and Bing in terms of
search security since all searches are encrypted, as reflected by the lock icon in the URL
bar. Furthermore, each search done on Ecosia becomes anonymous after one week,
ensuring excellent security for its users, as opposed to Google and Bing, which retain
fragments of search data (such as the device or date) even after removing the browser
history and cookies (Mair, 2020).

For a reforestation project to be successful, it must also provide

socioeconomic advantages to a locality, aside from the benefits it brings in
the aspect of environmental conservation.

Not 100%, but only about 80% of Ecosia’s profits are used to finance
reforestation projects.

Ecosia is not too far behind major search engines when it comes to search
results although the development of more advanced features will make it a
better performing search engine.

Due to financial limitations, Ecosia’s search results are sourced from Microsoft
Bing search engine technology. Like other search engines, ads are displayed alongside
organic search results.

For regular or daily searching, Ecosia is already a good search engine in the
sense that the results for most inquiries are not that far from google. Although it lacks
Google's frills, such as the bios that appear when users search for people, as well as
some definitions and conversions. They are behind in terms of additional features but
they have implemented a way to overcome any of these shortcomings by using shortcut
tags for external searches that will redirect you to more precise results, usually from
Google. Although most of their decisions especially when it comes to allocating their
finances are always guided by the question “Will it help us plant more trees?”, Ecosia
has reported to continuously financing the development of features that would make it
a better performing search engine.

Conclusion

Generally, Ecosia’s paramount redeeming quality is to provide a timely and

progressive outlook by prompting numerous tree-planting projects as a way to curb
environmental degradation and, at the same time, serving its function as an excellent
search engine. With its significant initiatives and respect for user privacy, it may not be
long until the onset of Ecosia’s position in being the most worthwhile search engine out
there.

Furthermore, Ecosia plans to curb deforestation, reduce carbon footprint,

mitigate climate change, and sustain the environment above all. Their notion goes
against that of the other search engines, notably Google, which only run to profit from
their users. Ecosia does not aim for profit maximization and instead aims to spur
beneficial environmental effects by using 80% of their profit to finance several
reforestation projects. Despite being the most used search engine, Google isn’t
objectively the best one in terms of being the most environmentally friendly search
engine since it does not follow a progressive outlook.