Chances are good that when you have a question, you don’t talk about it amongst friends anymore. Instead, you pull out your phone and simply Google it. The fact that “google” has become a verb shows just how ubiquitous the search engine has become. But with the climate rapidly changing, wildfires burning up vast areas in Siberia, the U.S., and Canada, and the recent alarming climate report, it’s never been more apparent that small things can make big changes. Enter a new search engine called Ecosia.org.
Of course, taking on Google is a tough prospect. It’s the schoolyard bully, the biggest guy on the field, the thick blanket that smothers all other competitors. But Ecosia is quickly coming up the track behind it. According to a press release, it’s now the fifth-largest search engine in the U.S. But it’s not just any old search engine — it does all the search enginey things, yeah — but Ecosia also plants one tree for every 45 searches.
The search engine was founded by a guy named Christian Kroll in December of 2009. It was after a trip around the world, where he saw the devastating impacts of deforestation. It was a relatively simple idea — like most good things are — but it quickly snowballed into something big.
Ecosia makes ad revenue, just like every other search engine. You know those top five results when you google something? Chances are those are advertisements that someone paid for. Instead of building rockets to go to space for ten minutes or whatever, Ecosia spends most of that money on tree-planting projects. A pretty staggering percentage, in fact: 80 to 100 percent of it. They cover their costs, then throw the rest into the future of the planet.
That has made them the largest financier of native tree restoration in the world. So far, Ecosia has planted over 130 million trees across 9,000 planting sites worldwide. The current rate averages out to a new tree planted every 1.3 seconds. Every month, they publish their financial reports and tree planting receipts, just so everyone knows they’re doing what they say they’re doing.
Aside from the tree planting initiatives, Ecosia has a few other benefits that the Googles of the world don’t have. Most companies rely on fossil fuels, which, as you know, are just acting as a bellows for the raging fire we’ve created. In 2018, Ecosia began building its own solar plants. Since then, they’ve added enough clean energy to the grid to power all Ecosia searches with 100 percent renewable energy.
It also doesn’t permanently store users’ data. Everything is wiped on a weekly basis, and the data it does collect for those seven days isn’t sold to advertisers. All searches are encrypted and it doesn’t use any external tracking tools, so basically, all it’s doing is answering your weird internet questions, taking ad money, and planting an enormous amount of trees. All good things, especially in today’s rapidly warming world.
Find out more about Ecosia here.
