Ecosia

What is Ecosia?

Ecosia (www.ecosia.org) is a free, non-profit search engine website that is powered by Bing for searching the web which plants trees with its ad revenue.

Notable Features

Unlike some derivative search engines like Kiddle, Ecosia doesn't actually offer any extra features or default settings on top of what Bing already offers. Searching on Ecosia is just like searching on Bing, except for a couple of things:

Tree-planting: Ecosia is a non-profit organization that is monetized by ads and that uses the money it makes as a search engine to plant trees and perform other ecological work in several countries around the world. They even do work here in Brazil, restoring, not the Amazon forest, apparently, but the Atlantic Forest¹ for some reason. Ecosia seems to be very transparent about its work and how it works as a search engine, specially compared to other, lesser known alternative search engines. Ecosia is certified by B Corporation, an organization that certifies companies that do social work. This doesn't really mean much to me, to be honest, but it at least means someone verified their work.

Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that plants and protects trees. By dedicating 100% of its profits to the planet, Ecosia has planted over 180 million trees since its founding in December 2009. In addition to trees, Ecosia invests in environmental and social initiatives like regenerative agriculture, renewable energy and community-driven climate projects. Ecosia’s mission is to create simple ways for people to be climate active every day and it hopes to cultivate a world where the environment doesn’t need protecting. It does this by putting people and planet first, whether it’s collaborating with experts and communities to plant the right tree in the right place, by producing two times as much energy as is required to power its searches, or publishing its monthly financial reports online to show its commitment to transparency. Demonstrating that small changes can make a big difference when aggregated, Ecosia has grown to become one of the world’s largest and most impactful environmental movements, supporting the environment, local economies and social stability around the globe.

https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/ecosia-gmbh/ (accessed 2024-05-01)

While this is all good, it's kind of hard for me to tell how good it is since I have no frame of reference. For instance, why wouldn't Bing produce more energy than its required to power their searches? That sounds like it would save money on the electricity bill. Just put some solar panels on top of the data centers. Do they plant trees? Let me just search for it on Ecosia... alright, I forgot this is powered by Bing, so I can't really find anything. Let me just Google it: "does bing plant trees." Even Google struggles to find any information, so I guess maybe it's not Bing's fault, they don't just do it all. The best result I got was this:

You can help by doing what you love—shopping online! When you click on our campaign banner and visit Bing shopping, you earn a point. You can earn up to one point a day, and when you reach 10 points, Microsoft will plant a tree for you in Kenya. It's that easy, and it's free. Microsoft has committed to planting up to 1 million trees through this program.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/faq-e-tree-on-microsoft-bing-shopping-b5dc93f0-0fbc-49ce-8dc1-31038640e93a (accessed 2024-05-01)

Up to 1 million tress? That's nothing compared to over 180 million trees! Well, I guess every tree counts. But regardless, as you can see, searching on Ecosia plants more trees than using Bing, so if you're okay with using Bing, may as well use Ecosia and plant some trees while you're at it.

Observations

Different UI: although Ecosia uses results from Bing, the way it displays these results is slightly different. The results on Bing have favicons, and the site's title, which Ecosia doesn't feature. On the plus side, if you search for images on Ecosia, it displays the domain name of the image below the image. On Bing, you have to place your cursor hovering the image to see it. This means you can easily tell if an image result comes from Pinterest on Ecosia, as this is clearly very important to anyone who searches for images. On the negative side, some features of Bing aren't exposed through Ecosia's interface. On Bing, you can specify the size of images to be "at least" a specified number of pixels in width and height, but Ecosia doesn't expose this functionality. It does expose the other options, like searching for small, medium, and large images. Similarly, "Last Year" is missing from the time filter, but "Last Month" is not.

References

1. https://blog.ecosia.org/brazil/ (2024-05-01) ↩︎