The perfect search engine for Earth Day

The “search engine wars” are heating up and Google, Yahoo and Bing are not the only players in the game. One of the fastest growing search engines in the U.S. is Ecosia (www.Ecosia.org). Ecosia is an ethical tech and not-for-profit search engine that aims to tackle the climate crisis by planting and protecting trees around the world.

As a certified B-Corp, Ecosia joins the ranks of companies like Patagonia, Ben & Jerrys, and Allbirds, who have met the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance. Users of this “eco-friendly” alternative to other search engines can track the number of trees they are planting with their searches, which help to reduce CO2 and the impact of climate change.

The company is founded on green principles and has built solar farms which produce enough renewable energy to power its searches twice over, the excess actively removing dirty energy from the grid. Ecosia is also currently the largest financier of native tree restoration in the world.

Ecosia is now the fifth largest search engine in the U.S. and is rapidly adding new users and planting trees. For every 45 searches, Ecosia plants a tree and it has now planted over 120 million trees across 9,000 planting sites worldwide. The current rate is a new tree planted every 1.3 seconds. Ecosia makes advertising revenue, the same as any search engine, but what's unique is that it takes 80-100% of that to reinvest into its tree planting projects around the world.

With over 110 million searches worldwide per week, Ecosia is becoming a major factor in search and the site’s annual U.S. search traffic jumped 219% in 2020. As an ethical tech company, it is also a completely privacy friendly search engine, as it does not permanently store users’ searches and they are deleted after a week. Ecosia does not sell any user data to advertisers, all searches are encrypted and it doesn’t use any external tracking tools.

You can use Ecosia at Ecosia.org, use it in your browser by making it your default search engine, or download the free browser extension. There are also Ecosia search apps for Android and Apple devices.

Ecosia has established multiple corporate partnerships to spread its eco-friendly message. In early April it will be launching a new “10,000 trees in 10 Days” campaign with Insight Timer, the world’s #1 free meditation app. If you would like more information on this initiative to help curb “eco-anxiety,” please let me know.

Happy "searching" on Earth Day!