Ecosia search engine: Plant trees while you search the web

Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees each time you search for something. The Bing-powered search engine earns about half a Euro cent with each search and spends 28 cents to plant a tree. So to plant one tree Ecosia only needs about 56 searches. This way, the Berlin-based search engine has already planted over 7 million trees worldwide.

Ecosia has focused on planting trees as it presents countless advantages, among which fighting climate change, restart water cycles, turn deserts back into fertile forests and provide nutrition, employment, education, medical assistance and political as well as economic stability.

"Google and Apple started with decent values" says Christian Kroll, founder of Ecosia. "They wanted to build something that improves the world. But as soon as you become a public company, shareholders exert influence." The litmus test, however, comes in trying to persuade other users to ditch the sites they know and trust. To his credit, Kroll seems keenly aware of this. "If you just have good intentions but don't deliver a product, then you are going to fail."