Search engines do not usually inspire my passion, although I am grateful for their usefulness. However a friend has just put me on to Ecosia (www.ecosia.org) and it gives a delicious frisson of pleasure as I go a-searching.

Ecosia is a web search engine based in Berlin, Germany which donates 80% of its surplus income to non-profit conservation organisations. Researchers at the University of Gottingen decided to lay out why what they do is valuable. ‘The environmental impact of IT is facing increasing public attention. The search engine Ecosia takes advantage of this situation by pursuing a Social Business model. Search engines need electricity to provide their services and indirectly produce CO2. The estimation of greenhouse gas emissions for the average search query using the market leader Google fluctuate between 0.2 g and 10.0 g of CO2. The search engine Ecosia tries to compensate the emissions by donating most of its revenues to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and save rainforest from deforestation.’

Ecosia, along with most search engines, shows ads next to its search results and is paid by partners at Microsoft Bing for every click on a sponsored link. The amount Ecosia earns per click on an ad strongly varies, depending on the competition on the  keyword and the value of what is being advertised. In general, a click on one of the more lucrative keywords (see Wikipedia) may finance multiple trees at a time.