Here's Why Your Should You Make Ecosia Your Default Search Engine
“If everyone used us instead of Google, we could plant 300 billion trees a year.”
**Updated October 2023**
Now, I’m pretty sure every person on Earth knows this by now, but I’m going to say it one more time just to be safe: we need to reduce carbon emissions.
Naturally, there are many different ways we can do this, ranging from overhauling the global energy and transportation systems to simply making better choices in our day-to-day lives.
So, if you like the idea of helping the environment without putting in any extra effort (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?), then you should make Ecosia your default search engine as fast as humanly possible.*
(*No, I don't get any money or goodies from Ecosia for writing this; it’s simply a great company that I think everyone needs to know about!)
What is Ecosia?
Ecosia displays search adverts and then uses 80% of the profits to plant trees.
Ecosia is a Berlin-based search engine founded in 2009 by German entrepreneur Christian Kroll.
When you search on Ecosia, it displays adverts just like Google – but then uses 80% of the profits to plant trees around the world. (UPDATE: This is now 100% with the launch of Ecosia’s new company manifesto. In its own words, “We’re all in.”)
On average, Ecosia needs 50 web searches to fund each new tree, and it has a handy counter that tracks how many searches you’ve made.
(Shameless brag: In my work as a sustainability copywriter, Î’m closing in on 20,000 searches, which is 400 new trees. Not too shabby!)
Ecosia uses the Microsoft Bing search engine (the second largest in the world) and adds its own algorithms and customizations on top.
For example, Ecosia’s “green search” uses a little leaf icon to highlight Earth-friendly organizations and a fossil fuel icon to flag those supporting and investing in coal mining.
Ecosia is a Certified B Corp, meaning it meets B Lab’s strict standards for transparency, accountability, and sustainability. Ecosia was the first German company to achieve this certification, thanks to its unique environmental and social business model.
While Ecosia is still a tiny fish compared to Google (which holds around 90% of the search engine market), the company is making remarkable progress.
It now has 15 million users and processes 10,000 web searches every minute. For scale, Google processes around 3.8 million every minute.
With more and more organizations joining the fight against global warming, Ecosia has become the default search engine at a growing number of universities in the UK and Europe.
It has also launched Ecosia on Campus to help students campaign to make it the default search engine at universities worldwide.
183 Million New Trees (And Literally Counting)
Ecosia’s monthly reports provide a clear breakdown of its costs, advertising, and tree-planting investments.
For a company that’s largely unknown, Ecosia has put up some pretty incredible numbers.
In 2019, during its tenth year, Ecosia hit the milestone of 60 million trees. Pretty great. Now, just three years later, it has almost tripled this figure.
At the time of writing this, Ecosia has planted a mind-boggling 183,445,725 new trees. And as the count increases every 1.3 seconds, I’m sure the figure will be much higher by the time you read these words.
Solar panels on the roof of one of Ecosia’s German data centers.
Today, Ecosia has more than 9,000 tree-planting sites in 30 countries around the world. Working with a network of partners, it has a strong focus on reforestation projects in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
And, as we’ve seen with countless technology companies over the last two decades - scale is everything.
Now, can you imagine how much of an impact this company will have if it really gets going? If it actually grows anywhere near Google’s size? Then we’re no longer talking millions of trees - we’re talking billions or even trillions.
In addition to its amazing reforestation work, Ecosia is 200% powered by renewable energy, meaning it produces twice as much clean electricity as it uses. According to its latest update, every Ecosia search actually removes 0.5kg of CO2 from the air.
And if that weren’t enough, the company recently invested €20 million into German renewable energy startup Zolar, which will help around 1,300 households switch to clean energy and accelerate Germany’s transition away from fossil fuels.
Ecosia Restores Nature, The Right Way
We all know that planting new trees is an inherently good idea, but not all reforestation programs achieve their intended results.
In some cases, the trees are planted but then not monitored or protected, resulting in saplings that either die or are destroyed by external forces. In others, the wrong types of trees are planted, creating monocultures or disruptions to ecosystems that ultimately do more harm than good.
One of Ecosia’s tree-planting sites in Brazil.
Thankfully, Ecosia takes a very measured approach to ensure every new tree delivers the maximum environmental and social benefits.
“We work with local partners for the whole process, from planning, to planting, to monitoring the trees carefully using geo-tagging, polygons and satellite imagery to see the positive impact of trees over time.”
- Christian Kroll, founder of Ecosia.
Working with its network of local partners, Ecosia plants native tree species in areas where they’re needed the most.
For example, Ecosia has growing operations in Indonesia, a country where 25% of natural rainforests have been replaced with palm oil plantations. Ecosia is helping to restore forest areas on former plantation sites to improve biodiversity while creating alternative sources of income. Since 2016, Ecosia and its partners have planted almost 1.5 million trees across 2,000 hectares throughout the country.
Ecosia’s reach is also extending to other parts of the world. It recently announced a new partnership to plant 5,000 new trees around Los Angeles to improve environmental and social equity. And following Australia’s devastating bushfires in 2020, Ecosia donated more than 26,000 new saplings in New South Wales to begin restoring natural rainforests. In its new manifesto, Ecosia also promises to monitor all new trees for up to 20 years with field visits and satellites to ensure their long-term survival.
Is Ecosia a Good Search Engine?
So by this point, I’m sure you’re probably thinking “Well all of the tree planting is great, but is Ecosia actually a good search engine?”
And thankfully, the answer is yes.
The thing is, sustainable companies now need to compete toe-to-toe with their non-sustainable counterparts. Frankly, that’s the way it needs to be. It’s no good offering products or services that help the planet if nobody wants to use them.
That being said, when I first started using Ecosia, its limitations were obvious. It was a bit like using a weird version of Google from ten years ago. My search results were often inaccurate, news articles were sometimes years out of date, and it just wasn’t a search engine that could stand on its own two feet.
However, I’m happy to say that Ecosia has improved dramatically over the last few years. The search results keep getting more relevant, the news articles more current, and, while it still doesn’t reach Google’s levels of clairvoyance - I think it’s clearly good enough to be a default search engine.
In a nutshell, Ecosia is basically the Fairphone of search engines: you won’t get the best performance, but it’s a damn sight greener than everything else.
“Ecosia looks, feels, and delivers results in a manner befitting of a safe and well-designed search engine. For those looking to give back to the universe in some way, the company’s green initiatives are inspiring, making you feel like your every query is going towards a good cause.”
More recently, I’ve also noticed Ecosia has added a shopping feature that highlights sustainable brands, although I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet.
(Have you? Let me and others know in the comments section - that would be super helpful!)
These days, I now use Ecosisa for about 70% of my web searches and Google for the rest. You’ll quickly learn the types of searches Ecosia is best for, and with its algorithms getting better all the time, I find it generally does a great job.
Is Ecosia a Safe Search Engine?
Ecosia isn’t a corporate tech giant - it has a small team of around 40 employees.
As the new kid on the proverbial block, there have been some concerns about Ecosia’s security. Some people, perhaps rightly so, were concerned that the tree-planting premise was merely a ruse to attract users and access their browsing data.
Thankfully, these suspicions were completely unfounded. In fact, Ecosia actually takes online safety far more seriously than most of its competitors, as detailed in its rigid and transparent privacy policy.
All web searches are encrypted, and they’re only stored for a maximum of one week before being anonymized.
Also, unlike many other search engines, Ecosia doesn’t sell any of your data to advertisers and doesn’t use any third-party tracking tools (such as Google Analytics) to maintain its services. These are deliberate measures to prevent other companies from accessing your search results.
So, all in all, Ecosia appears to be a very safe and secure search engine. Probably more so than the one you’re using right now.
Ready to Make a Green Change?
It’s hard not to smile when you do something good.
Alright, by now, I’m sure you can tell that I really like Ecosia. So, if you want to try it out for yourself, you’ve got a few options:
Go to www.ecosia.org and start searching
Make Ecosia your browser’s default search engine
Download the Ecosia app from the iOS or Android app stores