Ecosia: exciting ecological search engine!

Forest Nymph

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It's super easy to add Ecosia to Chrome on your laptop or home computer if you always use Google (most people do) and you can install it on your phone as well if you have the data storage.

They plant trees and also help people in developing countries live dignified, prosperous lives and all you have to do is do your normal Internet searching.

There's really no excuse not to do this, except not knowing about it. It's a viral thing at school now, the Associated Students are installing it on campus computers, and of course I will follow their lead when I see a college computer without Ecosia installed.

What a genius idea!

Get yours here: https://www.ecosia.org/
 
Great. Thanks. I did not know about Ecosia.
Took a minute and installed it on my laptop.
Then I created an email and sent it to all my friends.
Those wishing to spread the word can copy and paste this into an email
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Ecosia uses the ad revenue from your searches to plant trees where they are needed the most. By searching with Ecosia, you’re not only reforesting our planet, but you’re also empowering the communities around our planting projects to build a better future for themselves. Give it a try!

It's super easy to add Ecosia to your laptop, home computer, or phone. Works with Safari, Chrome, or FireFox.

There's really no excuse not to do this, except not knowing about it.

What a genius idea!

Get yours here: https://www.ecosia.org/
More info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia
 
I use 2 ad blockers so this would help at all.
I also don't want to use anything that uses Bing and is owned by Microsoft.
"Now if a smart user uses ad-blocker extensions, he would just harm the environment instead by using the Bing search engine at the back end which use 44% green power whereas Google data-centers are powered by 100% green technology solutions- as rightly pointed out by’Vincent Hoogstra’ in his answer."

https://www.quora.com/Is-Ecosia-better-for-the-environment-than-Google

Bottom line is, if you're not clicking on the ads, you're not helping to direct any money to WWF. I'd rather donate directly to WWF, personally.

"Ecosia is owned by Microsoft. With Ecosia you’re using the search engine of Bing. This search engine is not entirely powered by green energy. Google is powered entirely by green energy.Besides that, Google is far more efficient, you have to search less times on Google than on Ecosia, which reduces the use of energy. Therefore, with Ecosia you still have a big impact on the environment, which can’t be compensated with planting trees. With using Google, you won’t have the same emissions.

So the best thing you could do is just using Google, and giving some money to a tree planting organization."
 
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Their servers are completely CO2 neutral.


They can't claim to be CO2 neutral if they aren't, they can get sued for that. Also, I don't have any problems with ads.
 
Their servers are completely CO2 neutral.


They can't claim to be CO2 neutral if they aren't, they can get sued for that. Also, I don't have any problems with ads.
I don't believe anything Microsoft says (and corporations claim to be something they're not all the time. And they get sued for it.).
 
Well, okay. Ecosia is actually a small German business. Ecosia hasn't been linked to WWF since 2010, and just having the browser for a few days on my Google Chrome, I've helped plant 61 trees without even trying. Ecosia can now be tailored to Google, Firefox, and more. Even if Microsoft has invested as a parent company, it's not much different than how a lot of vegan food products enjoy wide, affordable distribution now because of corporate parenthood. Not that I like corporate parenthood, but the alternative to all of this is same old ****, different day, because that's just how our economy works right now until people can come together and really change it, which is too big for one person to solve.
 
Well, okay. Ecosia is actually a small German business. Ecosia hasn't been linked to WWF since 2010, and just having the browser for a few days on my Google Chrome, I've helped plant 61 trees without even trying. Ecosia can now be tailored to Google, Firefox, and more. Even if Microsoft has invested as a parent company, it's not much different than how a lot of vegan food products enjoy wide, affordable distribution now because of corporate parenthood. Not that I like corporate parenthood, but the alternative to all of this is same old ****, different day, because that's just how our economy works right now until people can come together and really change it, which is too big for one person to solve.
It's not that MS "invested in" Ecosia, Ecosia is *using* Bing - which means they are simply using MS's servers where Bing is running. At the end of the day, I would rather support Google over MS, and simply put, I believe Google to be a better search engine, like it or not, which means I'll spend less time searching for stuff - aka, smaller digital footprint for me.

It's not that I think it's a bad idea, it's just not quite there yet enough for me, personally.
 
In fact you actually can get Google results by simply installing Ecosia in Chrome and adding Google.com to end of the search words.

Google isn't that ethical of a company and Amazon is downright evil, so I think this fuss over Microsoft is a bit overblown considering the bottom line is that Google is still the most powerful search engine in the world and their enormous profits go to themselves and their investors while 80% of Ecosia profit goes to planting trees.

You are entitled to your opinion and obviously don't have to use Ecosia.
 
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Their servers are completely CO2 neutral.


They can't claim to be CO2 neutral if they aren't, they can get sued for that. Also, I don't have any problems with ads.

Similar to Google and others I think Ecosia purchase renewable energy to offset the CO2 generated by using third party services for example Ecosia do actually use AWS (Amazon Web Services) which aren't actually completely CO2 neutral yet unfortunately.

On your computer if you ping ecosia.org and then lookup the returned IP address using this link you'll find Amazon as the ISP and something similar to "compute.amazonaws.com" for a hostname which means they're using Amazon's compute or VPS instances, a lot of the internet runs on services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft unfortunately but at least Ecosia are offsetting it all which is great! :)

Also you may like to know that the forum runs on cloud computing provided by a German company called Hetzner on which the datacentre we use runs on hydropower which is pretty cool! https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/
 
Hi folks! I've looked into this in detail and here are a few details to clarify Ecosia's impact as a company.

I’m awarding Ecosia a score of 5/5 Green Stars for social and environmental impact based on the following:
  1. Ecosia uses 80% of revenue (after operational costs) to fund tree-planting operations.
  2. Advertising revenue from around 45 searches is sufficient to fund planting of one tree.
  3. It’s certified by B-Corporation for social and environmental impact, with a good score of 113.
  4. Ecosia’s servers are powered by company-owned solar plant.
  5. These solar panels produce twice the solar energy required for search; excess electricity is supplied to the grid.
  6. They do not use tax-avoidance strategies, unlike most other tech companies.
  7. Ecosia has better privacy terms and supplies fewer ads than major search engines like Google.

Regarding Microsoft:

There has been some confusion generated by a few people online (e.g., on Quora) suggesting that Ecosia is less green than Google. It’s based on an argument that Ecosia’s search algorithm is adopted from Microsoft Bing and therefore has a larger carbon footprint than Google’s. However, even though Ecosia’s search does partly rely on Microsoft’s servers (as well as Ecosia’s own solar-powered servers), the fact that Google is a little closer to carbon-neutrality than Microsoft pales into insignificance compared to the impact of tree-planting. Here are some numbers to explain this:

  • The carbon cost of a single web search: around 0.2 grams CO2, according to Google.
  • Carbon saved by tree-planting funded by Ecosia: 1 kg CO2 per search.
  • So the carbon captured from Ecosia-funded tree-planting is 5000-times greater than the footprint of a search.
More on Ecosia's social and environmental impact:

Ecosia is a social business that uses most of their revenue to plants trees – just think about that for a moment and compare to Google, which has become one of the largest corporations on the planet in large part due to revenue from advertising. Even with their small share of the internet search market, Ecosia has funded the planting of over 70 million trees. If Ecosia were to become as big as Google, the projected impact would be staggering: enough trees to capture 15% of global CO2 emissions (that’s roughly equivalent to capturing emissions from all road vehicles). Founder Christian Kroll has made legally binding agreements to make sure that their mission doesn’t change and that he can never sell Ecosia.

Ecosia versus Google:
One lesson from the section above is that it’s important to look beyond just one metric, when looking for an ethical product (such as a green search engine). Google may have covered the carbon cost of their servers but is not so responsible in other ways – for example, having a fleet of aircraft and a private airport. Also, Ecosia make a point of paying their taxes, because taxes contribute to the essentials of society: schools, hospitals, public transport, etc. That’s how a society is supposed to work, after all. Google (and most other multinational companies, for that matter) go out of their way to avoid taxes. For example, in 2016 the Guardian reported that Google paid €47m in tax in Ireland on €22bn in sales revenue – that’s a tax rate of 0.2% of revenue, while the rest of us pay tax at a rate of maybe 30% on earnings. There are other aspects of the debate on Ecosia versus Google (and other search engines) that have been covered in other articles: for example, this useful review article outlines how Ecosia respects your privacy more and also does not bombard you with as many ads as Google and the other major search engines.

More here with some visuals to illustrate the key points: https://greenstarsproject.org/2019/10/12/green-search-engine-ecosia/
 
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