

As it grows, the possibility of cashing out becomes weightier. In making their own operation sustainable, Ecosia’s founders foresaw a growing threat: their company’s value. The heavy lifting of operating a search engine is outsourced to a tech colossus. Ecosia pays for its own servers, maintains a browser plug-in and mobile app, and the rest of the team works on marketing and operations. Microsoft does not disclose how many engineers work specifically on Bing, but it’s clear from financial reporting around Bing that the company’s budget is several orders of magnitude greater than Ecosia’s.
ECOSIA SEARCH ENGINE SOFTWARE
Ecosia employs around 25 software engineers. The answer is that Ecosia can collect the profits per click of a major search engine (minus Microsoft’s cut) while spending next to nothing on the technology to create and maintain such a service. How is it that Ecosia has been merrily pumping out month after month in which it brings in at least double its total cost of operating-unheard of for nearly any business-while its technological backbone only recently became profitable? Trees generate their own emissions too.īing, meanwhile, was $1.3 billion in the red in 2013 and only became profitable in 2016.How many trees can we actually plant on available land? A whole lot.Just planting new trees isn't going to get us out of the mess we're in.Does planting trees really slow climate change? Ask a physicist.Though it is based on Bing, Ecosia anonymizes all user data after holding it for four days (according to Ecosia, this four-day period is for security purposes) and has a written agreement with Microsoft requiring the company to follow the same practice. You search to see if that was, as you suspected, Bill Hader doing the voice of that animated squirrel, and somewhere far away, a tree is put into the ground. One company is trying to do exactly that for our most perpetually present source of ongoing damage to the planet: the internet.Įcosia is a search engine that donates the bulk of its expendable funds to tree-planting organizations around the globe. If only, preposterously, all those minuscule actions were not tiny inflictions on the environment, but tiny improvements to it. But it’s everything, and that is paralyzing. If it were one element of our society or personal lives we’d have to change, that would perhaps be manageable. Your morning coffee, the clothes you wear, every inch you travel by motorized means-it all adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Climate change is the problem we have few answers for, because every little thing we do makes it worse.
