Hey folks,
I have been using the internet browser "Ecosia" for more than a year now.
What makes Ecosia special?
At the top right of the search engine is a personal counter. This counter counts your search queries (now comes the magic) and Ecosia stated that 45 search queries lead to a tree plantation financed by them.
By October 2017, Ecosia had planted approximately 15,000,000 trees.
In January 2018, approximately 20,000,000 trees.
In June 2018, Ecosia reaches 30,000,000 trees
In October 2018 about 40.000.000 trees.
In February 2019 about 50.000.000 trees.
In October 2019 about 70.000.000 trees.
The Berlin-based company is a search engine that gets its search results from Bing (formerly Yahoo) and was founded in 2009 and calls itself a "social business".
In 2019 its turnover was about 19 million Euros.
Since March 2018, it has been added to Firefox version 59, as a pre-installed search engine.
Ecosia caused a sensation by offering a purchase to a German energy company "RWE" for the controversial Hambacher forest. The offer was 1,000,000 euros. The offer was unfortunately rejected.
Functionality
The income is generated mainly through affiliate links of the partner shops. Normally, commissions are approximately 1% - 10%. 50% of the surplus income is donated to projects supported by Ecosia, with the goal of donating 80% of the surplus income.
All servers run on green electricity from Greenpeace Energy. Since the search results are provided by Bing, Ecosia purchases carbon offset certificates from myclimate to compensate the results of Bing.
From December 2009 to March 2013, €1,239,953.67 was donated to TNC, according to Ecosia.
From July 2013 to September 2014, according to Ecosia, €758,063.94 was donated to TNC.
Since October 2014, Ecosia has been supporting a project in the Sahel region in Africa and has donated a further €20,771,577 since then.
Privacy Policy
Data protection is subject of German law. According to the current data protection declaration, the data will be deleted or anonymised after 7 days. The partner Bing, who provides the search results, will be informed about the search requests and the date of retrieval as well as the IP address, the browser and the language setting.
Since September 2014, Ecosia has been using the encrypted version of http, https.
Impression
My favourite search engine is and remains Google. Google is and remains the most effective with its algorithm.
Duck Duck Go deserves the respect for privacy,
but Ecosia deserves our respect for her vision. It's just worth supporting. My counter shows me 2321 trees so far, but I've never bought anything, so it might as well be a 0. Maybe I can help a little with this.
Criticism
I already told you about this, they use the results of other providers, which are not always CO2 neutral.
