Ecosia - Search the web and plant trees!

lichtcatchtoby (60)in #nature • 6 years ago

Is has been a while since I posted my last English post. But this project seems to be the perfect reason to start again. This is the translation to my old post: LINK. I will tell you about a search engine which has a wonderful philosophy:

www.ecosia.org plants tree for your search requests.

Sounds crazy, I admit it. I didn't know the site myself until a few days ago, but now I have looked into it intensively. I wouldn't introduce this project if I wasn't convinced of it myself. Above all I found it also exciting that it is a German company. If you are not interested in the underlying company and how it works, but want to join, scroll down to "How can you use Ecosia?". For everyone else, I'll explain the project briefly. The basic principle is this:

Source: https://info.ecosia.org/what
The obvious criticism now would be that although Ecosia spends money for planting trees, it takes most of the profit into its own pockets. However, Ecosia actually uses at least 80% of the financial surplus for forest cultivation.

This is why we use all of the income which is not needed to run the company to support
reforestation efforts. Every month we use at least 80% of our surplus to finance tree planting projects.

Income- How is the project financed?

For all who don't know exactly how search engines generate revenue, here is a short explanation from me. You probably know this, no matter which search engine you use, you will see so-called "sponsored links" in your search results. Sometimes they are also marked directly as Ads. Here are two examples:

Search with Chrome + Ecosia Addon

Search with Edge via Bing
If a user clicks on one of these links, Escosia gets paid. So basically it's similar to an affiliate link like you may already know it from online stores like Amazon. To go into the financing in more detail, let me quote briefly from the corresponding Wikipedia article[1]:

Ecosia shows advertisements next to its search results, and are paid by their partners at Bing for every click on a sponsored link for having directed users to their advertisers. Considering that not every Ecosia user clicks on an ad every time they search, Ecosia states that on average a search raises around half a Euro cent (0.005 EUR).

Additionally I would like to mention that Ecosia does use an algorithm to filter out "fake" search queries. So you programmers can't work around it.

Transparency

For me personally, transparency is always one of the most important aspects of such projects. Just as with monetary donations, you want to know how the income is used. In this respect, we really must praise Ecosia very much. Each month, a financial report is published which can be viewed online. Here is for example a screenshot of the current report from June 2018[2]:

Financial report of Ecosia - June 2018[2] - For a higher resolution please click here
In the report you will find following statement:

This month we financed the planting of 4,850,375 trees.

I think it's pretty good for just a month. It would be great, if you would just have a look yourself at the PDF if you are interested You can find it at the end of this post at the sources.

Data privacy

The advantage that springs to mind for me here is the fact that it is a German company. German or/and EU law applies. Another indirect advantage is that by (theoretically) abandoning the Google search engine, you make it (minimally) more difficult for Google to create a user profile of yourself.

Ecosia does not promise to create user profiles and also states on its website that all search queries will be made anonymous after 7 days. The search engine also only allows connections via a secure HTTPS connection. They also mention directly, if you have activated a "Do Not Track" option in your browser, that they do not collect any analysis data at all. Many websites like to ignore this setting. In general, Ecosia is quite upfront here. After all, they have to collect certain data or pass them on to Bing. In this regard, however, they only store the least amount of data necessary. They also explain their procedure very transparently on their own website[3].

Who is behind Ecosia?

As I said, the company is from Germany. More precisely, the company is registered in Berlin. The company was founded in 2009 by Christian Kroll, who was shocked by the extent of deforestation after travelling the world. Ecosia seems to have understood that personal faces to interesting projects are always good. At the moment 18 people are working for the company, respectively these 18 are personally listed on the website[4].

How can you use Ecosia?

1 - Use the search engine

Easily explained, done even easier: Just use https://www.ecosia.org/ for your search queries on the Internet.

2 - Install the browser addon

There are also browser addons that you can install, so Ecosia will automatically become your default search engine and can be used directly from the address bar of your browser:
Google Chrome Addon
Firefox Addon

3 - Use the app on your smartphone

The lovely @k3lda has pointed out to me that there is also a corresponding smartphone app from Ecosia, both for Android and iOS devices:
Google Playstore - Ecosia App
Apple Store - Ecosia App

4 - Tell your friends and family about Ecosia!

Does not matter if you speak to them directly, via WhatsApp, send them the website link or my article. Spreading this project further in any case is positive.

5 - Set Ecosia as default search engine at other devices

That may sound strange at first, but maybe some of you are like me: you are IT-expert in your family who has to configure/rescue/repair everything. I am one of those people. Accordingly, I have to set up laptops regularly, or remove browser toolbars. From now on, I will always set Ecosia as the default, because whether Grandma, Mum or my Uncle searches with Ecosia or Google will be completely irrelevant to them. They probably will not even notice anything.