Plant trees while you search the web.
How’s it work? Ecosia plants trees with its ad revenue. On average, it takes 45 searches to plant a tree. And the search engine has currently planted more than 65 million trees to combat climate change.
The company’s user base has exploded in the past few years, with customers in 180 countries planting a tree every .8 seconds. In June 2019, the search engine invested half a million euros in tree-planting projects. Its 8 million users are currently funding 20 ree-planting projects in 15 countries.
What they’re saying: “We're seeing real growth in the US as people find out they can plant trees while they search the internet,” founder Christian Kroll said in an email, “which means we are on track to plant more than 100 million trees by early next year."
Some college students are organizing to establish Ecosia s their college’s official search engine.
Privacy concerns: With the extensive data breaches in the past few years, public weariness of data collection is at an all-time high. Thus, Ecosia has updated its privacy policy and “the search engine honors all do-not-track requests, anonymizes all searches within one week, and does not sell data to advertising companies or use third-party tracking tools like Google Analytics,” according to the Sierra Club.
Click to download the search engine.