Description
Ecosia is a search engine from Germany that advertises its investment of 100% of its surplus revenue in climate change projects. To date, it has spent nearly €100 million on climate protection and planted over 240 million trees. Ecosia GmbH is a Certified B Corporation.
Ecosia currently still uses the search indexes of Google and Bing. This has two disadvantages:
- IP addresses and search queries are passed on to big tech companies
- Searchers are exposed to a potential US bias
Fortunately, Ecosia is now working with the French search engine Qwant to develop its own search index. This is already being used for some of the search results on Qwant. It is not yet clear when it will be used for Ecosia.
Ecosia also cooperates with big tech when it comes to AI. OpenAI's API is used for the AI chatbot, which transmits prompts and metadata. In this case, too, Ecosia is working on its own solutions.
In order to use it, the search engine can be accessed via the website. Or you just make it the default search engine in your browser.
Summary
While Ecosia can be criticised for their collaboration with Big Tech and the inherent privacy concerns, I believe their commitment to mitigating climate change is worthy of support. This makes it a sustainable alternative to Google Search and Bing. The prospect of using their own search index makes it even more attractive.
Interesting to see will be how their approach to AI pans out. They want fast, resource-friendly answers and they want to enhance answers with climate change topics. Sounds a bit "greenwashy" to me, but let's see.