Founded in December 2009, Ecosia have an amazing big idea…
As part of our vision to reverse the tide of deforestation, we want to plant one billion new trees by the year 2020.
And they’re getting there steadily. As I write they’re approaching 6.25 million planted trees. Spending thirty seconds on the page gives you a nice little buzz as you see the number of trees increasing in real-time as you search. I’ve been using Ecosia for a day, and I’ve helped plant 52 trees with other users already.
A few excerpts from one of their blog posts demonstrates the difference I, you and lots of others could make if we used the Ecosia search engine regularly:
Let’s say you search with Ecosia three times a day for a year. That would mean 1095 search requests a year. Since we plant a new tree for every 56 searches on average (you can find more information on this here), you alone could finance 19.5 real trees every year.
Now imagine that you persuade 500 people, for example in your office, to start using Ecosia and contributing to the tree planting effort. That would mean that in one year we could plant 9,750 actual trees.
What if you could convince an organisation of 5000 members to install Ecosia as their default search engine? In one year that would be 97,500 trees planted.
And now imagine a university with 15,000 students. If they were to all make the switch to Ecosia you could finance the planting of 292,500 trees in just one year!
Very admirable and very achievable one would like to think, but, in these search engine obsessed (SEO) days of needing to get to the top of the search results pages and in front of eyeballs, does Ecosia perform for the searcher, and for the advertiser? How does it compare with Google?
It’s powered by Bing for a start, that’s Microsoft technology; whether you’re a Mac-addict, a committed PC, or just don’t care, you can’t argue against that level of technology.
Comparing search engine results pages (SERPS) shows that Ecosia lacks some of the contextual information that Google displays (the brief description and synopsis), but nothing that severely reduces the relevance or usefulness of the search results. Have a look at the SERPS for the phrase “rainforest deforestation”…
I’m not going to delve into Google or Microsoft’s green credentials and how they might compare, because I don’t think that matters in this instance. Ecosia is one of those concepts whose time has come; a seemingly simple idea enabled by a combination of technology and a concern for the environment married with real-life impact. It’s unlikely that I’ll stop using Google completely; I need to use it every day as part of my job, but achieving the right balance in the way we live our lives is important, even more nowadays, so I’ll be sure to continue using Ecosia and spreading the word.
Maybe you will too.
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