For functionality, I think Ecosia deserves 4 or 5 stars. Let’s face it: it’s hard to beat Google. However, for social and environmental impact, I think Ecosia deserves 5/5 Green Stars, blowing Google out of the water (read on for more info on the green stars rating). If you make Ecosia your default and you want to occasionally use Google for a specific search then just include the tag #g after your search term and Ecosia will bring you directly to the Google search results for that term. So it’s easy to maintain use of Google search for times when you think you need it (which isn’t that often, I find). There are other useful tags on Ecosia too – here’s a sample of them:#i for images#m for Google maps #n for news #tw will take you to the twitter results for your search#v for videos#w will take you to the related Wikipedia article#yt will take you straight to the YouTube results for your searchI’m awarding Ecosia a score of 5/5 Green Stars for social and environmental impact based on the following:1. Ecosia uses 80% of revenue (after operational costs) to fund tree-planting operations.2. Advertising revenue from around 45 searches is sufficient to fund planting of one tree.3. It’s certified by B-Corporation for social and environmental impact, with a good score of 113.4. Ecosia's servers are powered by company-owned solar plant.5. These solar panels produce twice the solar energy required for search; excess electricity is supplied to the grid.6. They do not use tax-avoidance strategies, unlike most other tech companies (like Google).7. Ecosia has better privacy terms and supplies fewer ads than major search engines like Google.There has been some confusion generated by a few people online suggesting that Ecosia is less green than Google. It’s based on an argument that Ecosia’s search algorithm is adopted from Microsoft Bing and therefore has a larger carbon footprint than Google’s. However, even though Ecosia's search does partly rely on Microsoft's servers (as well as Ecosia's own solar-powered servers), the fact that Google is a little closer to carbon-neutrality than Microsoft pales into insignificance compared to the impact of tree-planting. Here are some numbers to explain this:• The carbon cost of a single web search: around 0.2 grams CO2, according to Google.• Carbon saved by tree-planting funded by Ecosia: 1 kg CO2 per search.• So the carbon captured from Ecosia-funded tree-planting is 5000-times greater than the footprint of a search.For more detail on all of this, please check out the Green Stars Project (greenstarsproject.org)
