Ecosia, the Search Engine for the Planet- bye, Google
If 1% of users searching on Google were to search on Ecosia instead, we could plant over 1.2 million trees per day.
What is Ecosia?
Ecosia is an alternative search engine that plants trees with the money it earns from providing search data to internet users. Search data is what Google uses to make billions of dollars per year. Google sells ad space to make people consume more, Ecosia plants trees.
Ecosia doesn’t sell your data and they even tell you how much of the money they earn goes directly to planting trees.
What do I have to do (to save the world)?
You can “start planting trees” today by changing the default search engine in your browser (Google Chrome, Safari, etc.), find out how via the instructions below.
How can I update my search engine to Ecosia?
Ecosia provides in depth instructions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Below is a quick reference for Safari and Chrome users.
On a Mac in Safari:
- Open “Safari” application
- Click “Safari” in the upper-left corner of the screen
- Click “Preferences” in the drop-down menu
- In the “Search Engine” drop-down menu, select “Ecosia”
- Keep searching, start planting trees
On Chrome/Android:
- Open Chrome application
- Click the “…” meatballs/ellipses icon in the upper right corner
- Click “Settings”
- Click “Search engine” and select “Ecosia”
- Keep searching, start planting trees
On iPhone in Safari:
- Open “Settings” on your iPhone
- Scroll down within settings and click on “Safari”
- Click “Search Engine” on Safari settings page
- Select “Ecosia
- Keep searching, start planting trees
The math, numbers, and how we get to 1.2 million trees per day
For the record, for every 45 searches, Ecosia is able to plant one (1) tree. There are about 4.9 billion internet users at the time of this writing and they perform about 5.8 billion google searches per day.
Not accounting for scalability of the small, up and coming Ecosia, but if all of the searches done using the Google search engine were done using Ecosia search engine, over 128 million trees could be planted per day by Ecosia all over the world.
5.8 billion searches divided by 45 searches to plant 1 tree equals 128 million trees.
But that’s a perfect world, so how about if 1% of people who search using Google were to switch over to Ecosia? That’s still over 1.2 million trees that we could help Ecosia plant with one day of searching.
