Ecosia is a search engine that makes you smarter and saves the planet at the same time. Sounds too good to be true, right? That’s why naturally the question arises whether Ecosia is a scam or legit. Find out for yourself – in this honest Ecosia review.
What Is Ecosia?
For everybody not familiar with Ecosia yet: Ecosia is a search engine interface, which uses search results indexed by Microsoft’s search engine Bing and displays them in a familiar, Google-style layout.
What makes Ecosia different from search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo or the mighty Google itself is the fact that Ecosia uses 80% of its ad-generated profits to plant trees. That means whenever you click a paid ad in the search results, you help to save this planet.
If you are interested in where how many trees are being planet, Ecosia always publishes its monthly financial statements.
Note: In doing so, Ecosia was the main inspiration for B’n’Tree: You book a bed, we plant a tree. Try it. We plant a tree every time you book a bed, at no cost to you.
A Very Brief History Of Ecosia
Ecosia was created by Christian Kroll, who had formerly founded similar green search projects such as forestle. It went live on December 7, 2009 – right on time for the Copenhagen Climate Conference.
Due to its transparency and company philosophy Ecosia became Germany’s first certified B-Corporation in April 2014.
Ecosia Review: The Main Pros Of Ecosia
There is a huge ton of pros to using Ecosia. Since we can’t cover them all in this Ecosia review, here are the main pros of the tree-planting search engine interface:
Ecosia Is Easy
Ecosia makes planting trees and saving the planet extremely easy. Once installed, you will never have to do anything else ever again to continuously turn search engine generated ad revenue into beautiful, CO2 offsetting, planet-saving trees.
Adding Ecosia to Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox or any other web browser couldn’t be easier. Simply go to ecosia.org, and follow the instructions. If you can’t figure it out, you might not be the ideal individual to help save the planet. Or you’re sensible enough to appreciate that I wrote detailed instructions on how to install Ecosia and make it your default search engine a bit further down.
Ecosia Plants Trees
Ecosia markets itself as the search engine that plants trees. And that’s exactly what they do: 80% of Ecosia’s profits are invested in tree-plating projects across the globe. Revenue is generated when people click on paid ads in their search results. (Hint, hint.)
Their full financial reports, including which tree-planting projects have been supported over the past months and years, can be found here. Certainly an interesting read!
Maybe that should actually be added as additional pro of Ecosia: Their transparency. Or do you have any idea what Google and Bing and Yahoo do with all their ad revenue? (Go and Ecosia it.)
Ecosia Takes Your Privacy Serious
Ecosia takes your privacy serious.
They encrypt your searches, don’t store them, don’t sell your data, and you can turn off all the tracking.
In case you want to learn more about Ecosia’s privacy policy, you can read it here, or spend 27 seconds watching their video.
Ecosia Gamifies Search
Smart German engineering: Ecosia displays a search counter on the top right of your display, teasing your gamer’s instincts to push that number up as high as possible.
Before you get too excited about how you single-handedly averted climate change: Only approximately every 45 searches pay for one more tree. But you did want to find out about every single Chinese alphabetic character and its meaning a long time ago anyway, didn’t you?
Ecosia Makes You Smarter
Without trying to sound like Ecosia’s marketing maestro (I’m not): Ecosia does make you smarter. Because it gamifies search. Hence, it inspires you to search more often once you have Ecosia installed.
Whenever I’m waiting for a bus, a buddy or a beer (or anything else), I used to whip out my phone and wait for the next WhatsApp message to arrive. Then, dejected, texting random contacts random messages to receive random replies.
Thanks to Ecosia that’s a pastime of a past time. Now I’m planting trees while waiting for my Weizen.
And to do so, I need to come up with interesting search topics. So I learned about the world population of grey wolves and Bengal tigers (gosh – did you know how endangered they are?!), the massive contribution of India and China to overpopulate our planet soonest, what ‘Oregano’ actually means as well as fascinating magical illusions, a couple of time-saving lifehacks and how to solve a Rubik’s cube (almost there!).
That’s pretty good for time I would have otherwise wasted on meaningless chat conversations.
Any other suggestions what to learn next? Drop me a comment below, please.
Ecosia Programs Great Smartphone Apps
There’s an app for everything. Hence, of course, there’s an Ecosia app as well. And it has one pretty cool extra function, that I really enjoy: It includes a search bar in the top dropdown menu. (Where you turn Wifi and mobile data on and off, switch to flight mode etc.)
Means: Every time you turn on mobile data, or activate your WiFi, you’ll be reminded by Ecosia to start yet another search, and help yet another little bit to save the planet. Why did no other search engine think of that yet?
Ecosia Costs Nothing
I wonder why the question what Ecosia costs arises at times, but maybe that is because Ecosia sounds too good to be true. A search engine that makes you smarter and plants trees to help save the planet at the same time? Where’s the catch? What’s the cost?
Relax, and rest assured: Same as other search engines, using Ecosia costs nothing. Again, same as other search engines, they make their money by displaying ads, and they charge their advertising partners for that, not you.
Ecosia Review: The One Con Of Ecosia
When asking a wide Facebook community from all walks of life on their Ecosia feedback, the only downside occasionally being mentioned is Ecosia’s partner – Bing.
And yes, Bing unfortunately does not deliver search results of the same quality as Google does. Which is a massive bummer, since that is what search engines are for – to deliver great search results. Unfortunately, Google does not see a need to cooperate with green search projects such as Ecosia…
Nonetheless, most people agreed that Bing (aka Ecosia) is perfectly suitable for most everyday searches. For me, Ecosia does the job just fine for approximately 91.3% of my searches (but who’s counting?). And should your search results not deliver the desired answers, simply Ecosia for ‘Google’.
Is Ecosia Scam Or Legit?
A green search engine that makes you smarter while saving the planet? Sounds too good to be true, right?
But fear not – sometimes life just is as amazing as it sounds. Even Scamadviser rates Ecosia as 100% safe. Should that not be convincing enough for you, send the Ecosia team an email. Chat them up on Facebook. Or go visit them in Berlin.
If you’re still not satisfied, ask yourself: What have you got to lose? Ecosia is completely free to use, so you might as well give it a shot. Please help to contribute to further sensational success stories like the below.
Ecosia’s Recent Achievements
By November 2017, Ecosia had planted over 15 million trees worldwide!
To read about Ecosia’s recent achievements, take a quick look at their blog. Especially the stories about Ethiopia, the 2 friends who planted 5 million trees in one single year as well as the report on Madagascar are powerful.
How To Install Ecosia And Make It Your Default Search Engine
Now that you are entirely convinced that Ecosia is the next best invention after chocolate fountains, go install Ecosia. On your laptop. Your tablet. Your phone. On any online-search-capable device in your household. And in your neighborhood. Then go conquer the world!
No matter whether you use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer (really?), Opera or any other web browser, installing Ecosia and making it your default search engine couldn’t be any easier.
From then on, you’ll automatically plant trees by browsing the internet. How cool are you? You deserve an award.
Now tell your friends about it! The more trees we plant, the better!
Share this image with your friends and family to encourage them to use Ecosia as well.
It feels good to do good.
Installing Ecosia On Desktop Computers And Laptops
Simply visit Ecosia.org and follow the instructions.
As a standard skilled internet user with a standard internet speed, you’ll be done in 13.3 seconds. If you manage to beat 6.8 seconds, I might have a job for you. Clock’s ticking!
I could add dozens of screenshots on how to add Ecosia to Chrome (cause that’s what I use), or video my buddy adding Ecosia to Safari, but either result would take longer for you to digest than simply doing it. (Truth be told: It’d only be 3 screenshots, and the video would be max 15 seconds long, because the process is so simple. But still that’d be more than you’ll need to just do it.)
Installing Ecosia On Mobile Devices
Ecosia developed apps for both Safari and Android. As soon as your device is small enough to support apps, simply visit the AppStore or Google Play and download “Ecosia”. Install it on your iPhone, tablet, backup smartphone, Chromebook and all of your friends’ and family’s devices. The more, the merrier.
And then help spread the word even further!
Ecosia is awesome! It’s a search engine that plants trees AND makes you smarter! Not that you’d need that… but try it anyway. It’s free! Click To Tweet
You Can Make A Difference!
We already established above that you do deserve an award for planting trees while searching the web. Now help others achieve this as well. Spread the word by sharing this article. All together we will make a massive difference!
If you like, go one step further. Ecosia wrote a short guide and supplies all the instructions on how to make it he default search engine in your company, university, school, organization, local council and basically everywhere else where people search the web. Imagine how mother nature gently whispers “Thank you, awesome human” in your ear…