A SEARCH ENGINE THAT PLANT TREES ON EVERY TIME YOU BROWSE

 SOMEONE IS SITTING IN THE SHADE TODAY BECAUSE SOMEONE PLANTED A TREE A LONG TIME AGO 

                                                                                                                     -WARREN BUFFETT

Climate change is a global threat to the world. There are so many reasons behind this. One of the main reason is carbon emission in the atmosphere and there are two majorly factors for carbon emission, which are GHG(greesn house gas emission) and deforestation. Today problems like deforestation, increase carbon emission, global warming, less rainfall is not given much importance and all of these problems can be easily solved by just planting trees. So, there is no denying the fact that plants play an important role in our lives.

But what if I tell you that you can plant a tree every time you search on the browser. Yes, Ecosia is a search engine that does that for. Ecosia promises to save the environment with your internet searches and it is one of the highest-rated apps on Google Play Store. But how do they do that?

HOW ECOSIA WAS STARTED

Christian Kroll (founder of Ecosia)

It all started in 2009 when Christian Kroll travelled around the world to find inspiration for "a business model with a positive social impact". He actually became aware of deforestation when once he was travelling to South America. It is estimated that more than 1.5 billion tons of Co2 is released to the atmosphere due to deforestation and from there he learned what important role trees play.

He then moved to Berlin and started a search engine that can help for reforestation in the world. From here Ecosia was born. Ecosia claims that they have planted more than 105 million trees across 9000 biodiversity hotspots all over the world. On average, 45 searches are needed to plant a tree. Ecosia doesn't actually plant trees by itself, in fact, they donate 80% of its revenue to the non- profitable organisations like WWF(world wildlife fund) and WeForest which help in the process of reforestation. In April 2014, Ecosia was verified by third party B Corp. Std. ( that assess how much of a positive impact company have on workers, customers, community and environment). Thus we can easily trust the working and financial reports of the company. It is also said that every 1 search on Ecosia helps to kick out 1kg of Co2 from the atmosphere.

IS IT WORTH IT TO SWITCH TO ECOSIA?

For this question, let's compare Ecosia with one of our most used search engine, Google. Google is one of the most popular search engine and has billions of daily active users around the world. Will it be a good option to switch from google? let's see.

• So Ecosia is most popularly famous for planting trees, it is said to be eco friendly but if you see on the other side Google also actually uses 100% renewable energy to power its data centres whereas Microsoft bing( The majority of Ecosia's search results come from Microsoft  Bing) uses only 44%. With this case, Ecosia seems to be less eco friendly than Google but Microsoft has committed to 75% reduction in Co2 emission in its whole operation by 2030. But Ecosia tree planting projects are carbon negative, moreover planted over 105 million trees will account of sucking almost 2.5 million tons of Co2. Thus, both the search engines are eco friendly so, there is actually no comparison in this field.   

• The second thing is its privacy, Ecosia does not track its user's search history or the sites they have visited. All searches are SSL-encrypted. But Google tracks your data and search history to show you ads and make more money. So, in the privacy field, we can say Ecosia has a better privacy policy than Google.

• The third thing is their transparency, Ecosia is very transparent in terms of showing their revenues. They publish their financial reports every month and these reports can also be trusted as it is verified by B corp. Std. which you can't see in Google

CONCLUSION

After all this, I know how difficult it is to switch from Google to any other search engine. Google not only provides you with just a search engine but also gives you features like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth and so on which cannot be easily replaceable. But there is one tip if you are interested in switching to Ecosia you can just go to google webstore and add ecosia extension to chrome. By this you will get Google's page results, but are actually logging the searches on Ecosia (as also shown in the pic below). Thus ending up contributing towards the environment. Ecosia also provides a tree symbol at the corner which tell you how many trees you have helped in planting.

Ecosia extension

 Lastly, you are getting privacy protection of your data, a simple and free of a cost search engine, transparency in revenues and by this, you are also giving your contribution to the environment. So, why not just give it a try.

Google Chrome might be the best as the search engine but remember, There's always room for improvement.

REFERENCES

https://yourstory.com/2020/03/app-pro-privacy-search-engine-ecosia-browser-trees

http://chaddypratt.org/ecosia/history.html