 | This article contains promotional content .(January 2024) |
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Type of site | Search engine and web browser |
|---|---|
| Available in | English and 27 other languages |
| CEO | Christian Kroll |
| Revenue | 35.3M€ (2023) [1] |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Users | >20 million [2] |
| Launched |
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| Current status | Active |
Ecosia is a search engine and web browser based in Berlin, Germany. The company uses renewable energy to power its servers and invests its profits in tree-planting projects, aiming to absorb more CO2 than it emits. [3]
Ecosia was launched on 7 December 2009 to coincide with UN climate talks in Copenhagen. [4] Over time, Ecosia has supported various tree-planting initiatives. Until December 2010, Ecosia's funds supported a WWF Germany program that protected Juruena National Park in the Amazon basin. To protect this area, the organizers drew up and financed plans with timber companies and local communities. [5]
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. [6] The company states in its privacy policy that it does not create personal profiles based on search history or use external tracking tools. [7]
Ecosia's search results have been provided by Bing since 2017. [8] 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. [9] Search results from Google were added in September 2023. [10]
Ecosia has launched an AI Chatbot known as Ecosia Chat, Powered by OpenAI’s API and features a unique green answers option. [11] Ecosia does not share personal data with OpenAI; however, any information shared during chats is sent to OpenAI. [12] Although, the data from these chats will not be used to train OpenAI's models, chat data is stored in OpenAI's database for up to 30 days, and OpenAI will access this data for issue resolution, conversation recovery. Ecosia retains chat queries to improve its service but does not store personal information. [13] [14]
Ecosia uses 80% of its profits (47.1% of its income) from advertising revenue to support tree-planting projects. [15] [16] [17] In October 2018, founder Christian Kroll announced he had given some of his shares to the Purpose Foundation. [18] 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. [19] [20]
In a May 2021 Handelsblatt article, example figures from March showed revenues of €1,969,440,[ citation needed ] 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,[ citation needed ] according to Kroll, but Ecosia gets a large portion of the sales. Kroll told Handelsblatt he's not allowed to reveal the exact percentage. The €789,113 expenditure for March 2021 amounted to 80% of that month's would-be profits. [21]
Microsoft receives income from Ecosia, and Ecosia can keep its investment in infrastructure small through the use of Bing's existing implementation. In March 2021, the 82-person company spent only €73,000 on servers and software, compared to €381,000 on personnel costs. [21]
In January 2023, Ecosia handled 0.29% of European search requests, behind DuckDuckGo's 0.53%, Bing's 3.65%, and Google's 92.23%. [22]
As of 2024, Ecosia has handled 0.30% of European search requests and 0.09% of global search requests. [23]
In October 2020, Ecosia announced it had bought a 20% stake in the debit card company TreeCard. [24] [25] It planned to launch a new debit card in 2021, in partnership with Mastercard. [26] Cards produced by TreeCard are made of British cherry wood instead of the customary plastics found in most other debit cards. [25] [26] Ecosia intended to send 80% of its profits from the card to global reforestation projects. [25]
In 28 June 2022, Ecosia introduced freetree, a browser extension that lets users plant trees while they shop online. Freetree's commission-based referral program works by giving a small percentage (around 2–3%[ citation needed ]) of net sales to the referrer when a recommended customer makes a purchase. The majority of this commission goes directly towards tree planting in Ecosia reforestation projects, while a small portion is used for the development and operation of freetree as well as marketing efforts to attract more participants. [27] [28]
In 2023, Ecosia also set up an incubator for regenerative agriculture, invested into climate tech solutions and diversified their search providers for an improved search experience.[ citation needed ]
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Ecosia is B Lab certified, having met its standards of accountability, sustainability, and performance. As of 1 February 2024, the company claims to have planted more than 200 million trees since its inception. [29] [30] The company has been certified since April 2014. [31] [32]
By July 2020, Ecosia had surpassed 100 million trees planted in total, resulting in over 50,000 metric tonnes of CO2 being removed from the atmosphere each month. In June 2022 Ecosia had passed 150 million trees planted. [33] [34] [35] [36] It was reported in the same month that Ecosia, on average, was able to fund a tree planting every 0.8 seconds – averaging 75 per minute or 108,000 per day – with the revenue it makes from advertising. [35]
According to Ecosia speaking in 2021, each search removes 1 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere. [2]
An article in Ethical Consumer examined Ecosia and its relation to its search provider, Bing. Giving Ecosia an "Ethiscore" of 11, in contrast to Google (5.5) and Microsoft Bing (6.5), Ethical Consumer found Ecosia to be superior to the other search engine companies it looked at, but marked it down in seven categories for its relationship with Microsoft (the lowest scorer in those categories). [37] Ethical Consumer made a point of clarifying that it's not the actual searches which lead to tree planting, but the click-through of search engine users to the ads, and called for improved transparency concerning its relationship with Microsoft Bing. [37]
Ecosia is available on Google Chrome, [15] Firefox, [16] Safari, [38] Microsoft Edge, [39] and other browsers as a default search engine by downloading the extension from the Chrome Web Store or Mozilla's Add-on site, among others. In Mobile phones, Ecosia has its own chromium based web browser app in Google Play Store and App Store.
As of 26 January 2016, with its version 26 release, the Pale Moon web browser has included Ecosia as its default search engine, as has the Polarity web browser since its release in 15 February 2016. [40] Ecosia also briefly was the default search engine of the Waterfox web browser starting with version 44.0.2. [41] And Vivaldi has included Ecosia as a default search engine option since its version 1.9 release. [42] In March 2018, Firefox 59.0 added Ecosia as a search engine option for the German version. [43] [44]
On 12 August 2019, Ecosia announced it would not participate in the "search-choice" auction to appear on Android devices led by Google. [45] This meant that in 2020, European Android phone users did not have the option to set Ecosia as a default search engine. Christian Kroll explained the boycott decision saying, "We're deeply disappointed that Google has decided to exploit its dominant market position in this way. Instead of giving wide and fair access, Google has chosen to give discrimination a different form and make everyone else but themselves pay, which isn't something we can accept". [45]
As of 12 March 2020, Ecosia was included as a default search engine option for Google Chrome in 47 markets, the first time a not-for-profit search engine appeared as a choice to users. [46] On 14 December 2020, Apple's Safari web browser added Ecosia as a search engine option in macOS Big Sur 11.1 and iOS/iPadOS 14.3. [38] On 28 January 2021, Ecosia became an official search engine on the Brave browser as a result of a partnership announced that day by both companies. [47] [48]
On 22 April 2024, Ecosia launched its own Chromium-based web browser for desktop users. The company also started to promote affiliate links to collect revenue from user purchases on sites such as Amazon. [49]
On 17 December 2024, Mozilla announced their partnership with Ecosia, without explicitly stating what that partnership entails. [50]
A web browser is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. By 2020, an estimated 4.9 billion people had used a browser. The most-used browser is Google Chrome, with a 67% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 18%.
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. Firefox is available for Windows 10 and later versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its unofficial ports are available for various Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and other operating systems, such as reactOS. Firefox is also available for Android and iOS. However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements. An optimized version is also available on the Amazon Fire TV as one of the two main browsers available with Amazon's Silk Browser.
The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, operates critical infrastructure, and controls Mozilla trademarks and copyrights. It owns two taxable subsidiaries: the Mozilla Corporation, which employs many Mozilla developers and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and MZLA Technologies Corporation, which employs developers to work on the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and coordinate its releases. The Mozilla Foundation was founded by the Netscape-affiliated Mozilla Organization. The organization is currently based in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, United States.
A browser war is a competition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The "first browser war" (1995–2001) consisted of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and the "second browser war" (2004-2017) between Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome.
This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.
Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results.
The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."
Microsoft Bing, commonly referred to as Bing, is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.
Mozilla Firefox 4 is a version of the Firefox web browser, released on March 22, 2011. The first beta was made available on July 6, 2010; Release Candidate 2 was released on March 18, 2011. It was codenamed Tumucumaque, and was Firefox's last large release cycle. The Mozilla team planned smaller and quicker releases following other browser vendors. The primary goals for this version included improvements in performance, standards support, and user interface.
DuckDuckGo is an American software company focused on online privacy, whose flagship product is a search engine of the same name. Founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, its later products include browser extensions and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser. Headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania, DuckDuckGo is a privately held company with about 200 employees. The company's name is a reference to the children's game duck, duck, goose.
Do Not Track (DNT) is a formerly official HTTP header field, designed to allow internet users to opt out of tracking by websites—which includes the collection of data regarding a user's activity across multiple distinct contexts, and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred.
Pale Moon is a free and open-source web browser licensed under the MPL-2.0 with an emphasis on customization. Its motto is "Your browser, Your way." There are official releases for Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux.
Waterfox is a free and open-source web browser and fork of Firefox. It claims to be ethical and user-centric, emphasizing performance and privacy. There are official Waterfox releases for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. It was initially created to provide official 64-bit support, back when Firefox was only available for 32-bit systems.
Firefox was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser, first released as Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004. Starting with version 5.0, a rapid release cycle was put into effect, resulting in a new major version release every six weeks. This was gradually accelerated further in late 2019, so that new major releases occur on four-week cycles starting in 2020.
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
uBlock Origin is a free and open-source browser extension for content filtering, including ad blocking. The extension is available for Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Pale Moon, as well as versions of Safari before 13. uBlock Origin has received praise from technology websites and is reported to be much less memory-intensive than other extensions with similar functionality. uBlock Origin's stated purpose is to give users the means to enforce their own (content-filtering) choices.
A progressive web application (PWA), or progressive web app, is a type of web app that can be installed on a device as a standalone application. PWAs are installed using the offline cache of the device's web browser.
Firefox Focus is a free and open-source privacy-focused mobile browser by Mozilla, based on Firefox. It is available for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Its predecessor, Focus by Firefox, was released in December 2015 as a tracker-blocking application which worked only in conjunction with the Safari mobile browser on iOS. It was developed into a minimalist web browser in 2016 but retained this background blocking functionality. The Android version of the browser was first released in June 2017 and was downloaded over one million times in the first month. As of January 2017, it was available in 27 languages. The version released for German-speaking countries has telemetry disabled and is named Firefox Klar to avoid ambiguity with the German news magazine FOCUS.
Cliqz was a privacy-oriented web browser and search engine developed by Cliqz GmbH and majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media. It was available as a desktop and mobile web browser as well as an extension for Firefox itself.
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