This Search Engine Uses Its Earnings to Help the Environment. New Dashboard Lets You Track Your Impact

Ecosia is branching out in its efforts to be an eco-conscious Google alternative: Instead of primarily planting trees, this search service is now undertaking a wider variety of climate initiatives and providing a dashboard to registered users to show how they’re contributing to that work.

The Berlin-based company’s new “impact counter” highlights the changing nature of its climate activism beyond the more than 230 million trees it’s now had planted. 

“We started out as a tree planting search engine but we’ve expanded far beyond that and are now invested in a range of climate impact initiatives, from renewable energy and climate tech, to protecting biodiversity,” says Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll. “As governments are rolling back climate protections all over the world, we’re doing the opposite, putting the power to tackle the climate crisis right in our users’ hands and making it easier than ever to make a real difference.” 

The impact counter, per Ecosia’s documentation, tracks the virtual “seeds” you’ve collected (one for each day you use Ecosia) and lists the average effect of Ecosia use from people at that same level. 

In an account created Thursday morning with entry-level “Green Explorer” status, those effects consisted of having six tree seedlings planted (which equates to one growing tree factoring in “the average survival rate of the trees in tough conditions”) and 125Wh of energy generated via the solar panels Ecosia has had built. 

Ascending to such higher levels as “Planet Protector” unlocks two additional impact-counter categories: habitat restoration and tree care. 

Ecosia outlines plans for further gamification in a blog post: “You’ll be able to shape your journey, receive climate tips tailored to your interests, unlock planet-friendly rewards, and explore behind-the-scenes stories about how your seeds are restoring landscapes, supporting communities, and protecting ecosystems.”

An Ecosia spokesman said the company’s climate projects include investing in the World Fund, an EU venture-capital fund backing climate startups, and backing the construction of a solar farm in Rottenbach, Germany.

Ecosia, founded in 2009, says it has 20 million users; in March, the spokesman said the company had seen a “250% increase in new users” that reflected growing unease over the political influence of large tech firms. 

Ecosia itself has voiced its own unease about Big Tech power, with Kroll telling me in a November 2023 interview that Microsoft’s increased rates to syndicate Bing search results would leave Ecosia economically unviable. 

The company has since begun syndicating Google results but also launched European Search Perspective, a partnership with the Paris-based search firm Qwant to generate an index of French and German-language pages in the EU. In October, Ecosia inked a deal with the digital-marketing firm System1 to further enhance its search results with data from that firm. 

This rebuilt search service, however, may have its own issues: My attempt to locate that 2023 interview of Kroll with a search for “Ecosia Pegoraro site:pcmag.com” did not locate that post, while Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo, and Brave had that story as their top results for that query.

About Rob Pegoraro

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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

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