Ecosia

Ecosia is a search engine based in Berlin, Germany. Ecosia considers itself a social business, claiming to be CO2-negative, supporting full financial transparency, and protecting the privacy of its users. Ecosia is B Lab certified, meeting its standards of accountability, sustainability, and performance. , the company claims to have planted more than 181 million trees since its inception and planting a tree every 1.3 seconds. Search engine At launch, the search engine provided a combination of search results from Yahoo! and technologies from Microsoft Bing and Wikipedia. Advertisements were delivered by Yahoo! as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company. Ecosia's search results have been provided by Bing since 2017. Advertisements provided by Microsoft Advertising appear alongside search results, and 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. In 2018, Ecosia committed to becoming a privacy-friendly search engine. Searches are encrypted (presumably with standard HTTPS) and not stored permanently, nor is data sold to third-party advertisers. The company states in its privacy policy that it does not create personal profiles based on search history or use external tracking tools like Google Analytics. , Ecosia users conducted over 10,000 searches every minute. Business model Ecosia uses 80% of its profits (47.1% of its income) from advertising revenue to support tree-planting projects. 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. In a May 2021 Handelsblatt article, example figures from March showed revenues of €1,969,440, while the largest expenditure was "trees" at €789,113, ahead of the second-largest expenditure, operating costs, at €543,425. Users entering a keyword in Ecosia essentially see the same results as via Bing, including the ads. When someone clicks on an ad in Ecosia, Microsoft earns money, according to Kroll, but Ecosia gets a large portion of the sales. Kroll told Handelsblatt he's not allowed to reveal the exact percentage.