# Ecosia

Ecosia is a search engine and web browser based in Berlin, Germany.

## History

Ecosia was launched on 7 December 2009 to coincide with UN climate talks in Copenhagen. Its name derives from a combination of the words "eco" (from the word ecology) and "utopia".

## Services
### Ecosia

Ecosia delivers a combination of search results from Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Wikipedia.
Advertisements are delivered by Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company.

### Ecosia Chat

The Ecosia Chat is an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI's API and features a unique green answers option.

### Freetree

Freetree is a browser extension that lets users plant trees while they shop online.
Freetree's commission-based referral program works by giving a small percentage (around 2–3%) of net sales to the referrer when a recommended customer makes a purchase.
The majority of this commission goes directly towards tree planting in Ecosia reforestation projects, while a small portion is used for the development and operation of Freetree as well as marketing efforts to attract more participants.

## Privacy

Ecosia states in its privacy policy that it does not create personal profiles based on search history or use external tracking tools.
As for the Ecosia Chat, Ecosia retains queries to improve its service but does not store personal information.
They do not share personal data with OpenAI; however, any information shared during chats is sent to OpenAI.
Although the data from these chats will not be used to train OpenAI's models, chat data is stored in OpenAI's database for up to 30 days to access this data for issue resolution, conversation recovery.

## Business model

The company uses renewable energy to power its servers and invests its profits in tree-planting projects, aiming to absorb more CO$_2$ than it emits.
In October 2018, founder Christian Kroll announced he had given some of his shares to the Purpose Foundation. As a result, Kroll and Ecosia co-owner Tim Schumacher gave up their right to sell Ecosia or take any profits out of the company.
Ecosia is also transparent about their financial status as their financial reports are readily available online on their website.
In 2022, Ecosia stated that it earns "a few cents" on every click of an ad, as well as a portion of the price of a purchase made through an affiliate link.

## Partnerships
### Microsoft

Ecosia has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft to keep its investment in infrastructure small, through the use of Bing's existing implementation and an ad revenue sharing agreement.

### TreeCard

In October 2020, Ecosia announced it had bought a 20% stake in the debit card company TreeCard. Cards produced by TreeCard are made of British cherry wood instead of the customary plastics found in most other debit cards. It planned to launch a new debit card in 2021, in partnership with Mastercard. Ecosia intended to send 80% of its profits from the card to global reforestation projects.

### Qwant

In November 2024, Ecosia announced that it had partnered with Qwant in a joint-venture to build the European Search Index, a search index created to provide more localized search results in the French and German languages, and to reduce the reliance on Bing and Google.

## Impact
### On internet search

Ecosia, speaking in 2021, claims that each search removes 1 kg of CO$_2$ from the atmosphere.
In January 2023, Ecosia handled 0.29% of European search requests, behind DuckDuckGo's 0.53%, Bing's 3.65%, and Google's 92.23%.
As of 2024, Ecosia has handled 0.30% of European search requests and 0.09% of global search requests.

### On ESG

Over time, Ecosia has supported various tree-planting initiatives.
Ecosia uses 80% of its profits (47.1% of its income) from advertising revenue to support tree-planting projects.
Ecosia is B Lab certified, having met its standards of accountability, sustainability, and performance. The company has been certified since April 2014.

#### On tree-planting

By July 2020, Ecosia had surpassed 100 million trees planted in total.
In June 2022 Ecosia had passed 150 million trees planted.
In 2023, Ecosia also set up an incubator for regenerative agriculture, invested into climate tech solutions and diversified their search providers for an improved search experience.
It was reported in the same month that Ecosia, on average, was able to fund a tree planting every 0.8 seconds – averaging 75 per minute or 108,000 per day – with the revenue it makes from advertising.
As of 1 February 2024, the company claims to have planted more than 200 million trees since its inception.

## Availability

Ecosia can be used on any web browser from ecosia.org. Web browsers can also be configured to use the search engine from a built-in user interface without having to load a web page first.
Ecosia can be made the default built-in search engine on Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and other browsers as by downloading the extension from the Chrome Web Store or Mozilla's Add-on site, among others. In Mobile phones, Ecosia has its own chromium based web browser app in Google Play Store and App Store.
As of 26 January 2016, with its version 26 release, the Pale Moon web browser has included Ecosia as its default search engine, as has the Polarity web browser since its release in 15 February 2016. Ecosia also briefly was the default search engine of the Waterfox web browser starting with version 44.0.2. Vivaldi has included Ecosia as a default search engine option since its version 1.9 release. In March 2018, Firefox 59.0 added Ecosia as a search engine option for the German version.
As of 12 March 2020, Ecosia was included as a default search engine option for Google Chrome in 47 markets, the first time a not-for-profit search engine appeared as a choice to users. On 14 December 2020, Apple's Safari web browser added Ecosia as a search engine option in macOS Big Sur 11.1 and iOS/iPadOS 14.3. On 28 January 2021, Ecosia became an official search engine on the Brave browser as a result of a partnership announced that day by both companies.
On 22 April 2024, Ecosia launched its own Chromium-based web browser for desktop users. The company also started to promote affiliate links to collect revenue from user purchases on sites such as Amazon.
On 17 December 2024, Mozilla announced their partnership with Ecosia. On 21 January 2025, Firefox added Ecosia as an default search option for users in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.

## Issues
### Dependence on Bing

An article in Ethical Consumer examined Ecosia and its relation to its search provider, Bing.
Giving Ecosia an "Ethiscore" of 11, in contrast to Google (5.5) and Microsoft Bing (6.5), Ethical Consumer found Ecosia to be superior to the other search engine companies it looked at, but marked it down in seven categories for its relationship with Microsoft (the lowest scorer in those categories).
Ethical Consumer made a point of clarifying that it's not the actual searches which lead to tree planting, but the click-through of search engine users to the ads, and called for improved transparency concerning its relationship with Microsoft Bing.

### Boycott of Google

On 12 August 2019, Ecosia announced it would not participate in the "search-choice" auction to appear on Android devices led by Google. This meant that in 2020, European Android phone users did not have the option to set Ecosia as a default search engine.
Christian Kroll explained the boycott decision saying,
   "We're deeply disappointed that Google has decided to exploit its dominant market position in this way. Instead of giving wide and fair access, Google has chosen to give discrimination a different form and make everyone else but themselves pay, which isn't something we can accept".