How green is your search engine?
If you’re using Green Maven, Truevert, Ecocho, EcoSearch 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.
