| Price | Free |
| Version | 7.0.2 |
| Category | Communication |
| Developer | Ecosia |
| Source | iOS, Android |
| Rating | (4.4) |
Ecosia is an ecological and sustainable web search engine. Although there are dozens of search engines on the market today, such as Google and Bing, Ecosia has been with us for more than a decade thanks to a series of principles that remain unchanged. How can a browser be “ecological” and “sustainable”? Very easy: by following a series of very positive principles: each search performed in Ecosia serves to plant a tree, which in turn translates into eliminating CO2 from the environment.
Ecosia is an Internet search engine that stands out for being ecological and sustainable in each of its facets. Created in December 2009 by Christian Kroll, it was born with a very clear precept: that each of the searches performed by users would be used to plant a tree. From here, Ecosia has been growing in popularity for more than a decade, to the point that it has broken into the TOP 5 web search engines today. Ecosia is fast, reliable and secure. The interface it uses is practically similar to that of Google or Bing, so everything you see on the screen is very familiar. Searches performed in Ecosia are not stored permanently, so there is no exhaustive tracking, search history, detailed analysis and the data is not sold to third party advertisers. However, as the search engine shares architecture with Bing (enhanced with its own algorithms), there is the possibility of personalizing search results, although this decision is up to the user and no one else.
Faced with an initiative of this type, it is normal that the question arises as to whether it is a fake or a real project. Fortunately for everyone, Ecosia is real. The company is not only carbon neutral, but also has a zero negative footprint, since it produces twice as much renewable energy as is needed to run its search engine (thanks to the construction of solar plants it has undertaken). Taking this as a premise, Ecosia donates 80 percent of its revenues to non-profit organizations that are linked to reforestation around the world. In addition, in October 2020, Ecosia sold 99 percent of its shares to the Purpose Foundation to ensure that the company can never be sold or bought by third parties, as well as profit from it. The company has more than 70 employees working to keep the search engine growing.
The main curiosity of Ecosia is that each search performed serves to plant a tree. As soon as its website is accessed, a counter appears in the foreground to reflect how many trees have been planted to date. The goal is to reach more than one billion by 2025. Currently, Ecosia’s reforestation areas are very diverse. It has planted trees in places such as Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, Morocco and Spain itself. However, one of its most important centers of action is in Brazil, where logging in the Amazon is destroying the planet’s lungs.
As we have seen, Ecosia is a web search engine where the values it conveys are what prevail above all else. Ecological and sustainable in all its aspects (from the first process to the last in the chain), Ecosia stands out for being increasingly integrated among users, in addition to having a great compatibility with Google Chrome thanks to its extension. Using Bing to obtain your searches plus its own algorithms is a seal of quality, as well as renouncing any kind of tracking or data storage. Not only will users be able to search for anything they want, but they will also be able to do so securely and freely. A web search engine where every question has a real-life answer.
