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With Ecosia, save the rainforest using your web search engine

By | December 3, 2009, 2:07 PM PST

How green is your search engine?

If you’re using Green MavenTruevertEcochoEcoSearch or GoodTree, probably pretty green. Some surface green content in search regults, some promise to offset your searches with carbon credits (what, you think all the servers crunching your requests don’t impact the environment?), some tout partnerships with environmental organizations.

But new search engine Ecosia says it’s the “world’s greenest search engine.”

It promises to donate 80 percent of all the proceeds made on searches to the World Wildlife Fund’s rainforest protection projects in Brazil’s Amazonas region. Their take: by using Ecosia for searches, you’re actively helping preserve rainforests.

Preserve rainforests, save wildlife. Save wildlife, keep the planet cool. Keep the planet cool, combat climate change.

Get it?

Ecosia gives you incentive by actually allowing you to track how much rainforest you’ve “saved” with searches.

The finance behind the venture: Each click on a sponsored link on Ecosia will provide WWF’s Amazon rainforest with a protected area of 2 square meters.

The math adds up: 500,000 users and 1 million searches could save 2 million square metres of rainforest every day, the same size as Monaco, the WWF says.

Or every year, an area the size of Switzerland.

“Thanks to sponsored links, search engines earn billions every year,” said Ecosia founder Christian Kroll in prepared remarks. “Ecosia believes that there is a more eco-friendly way of using these huge profits and that the money should better be used to fight global warming.”

Ecosia is powered by Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing.

[via TreeHugger]

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Andrew Nusca

About Andrew Nusca

Andrew Nusca is editor of SmartPlanet.

Andrew Nusca

Andrew Nusca

Editor

Andrew Nusca is editor of SmartPlanet and an associate editor for ZDNet. Previously, he worked at Money, Men's Vogue and Popular Mechanics magazines. He holds degrees from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and New York University. He based in New York but resides in Philadelphia.

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Andrew Nusca

Andrew Nusca
Andrew Nusca does not hold any investments in the companies he covers.
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RE: With Ecosia, save the rainforest using your web search engine
I'm trying to use Ecosia, but when I click on the sponsored links, I get "Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed."

Any reason why this might be happening?
Posted by jonflores
4th Dec 2009
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And has anyone considered...
...exactly how they get the proceeds to do these wonderful things, and
the carbon that is ultimately spewed to make that possible?
Posted by JohnMcGrew@...
4th Dec 2009
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