Ecosia
More info
- Creator
- Christian Kroll
- Released
- 2009
- Type
- Search engine
A Berlin search engine that spends its ad profits on planting trees and has made itself impossible to sell.
Launched in 2009 by Christian Kroll. The search results have mostly come from Bing and the revenue from the ads beside them; the difference is what happens to the profit. Ecosia publishes monthly reports on how much goes to tree planting, and the tally has passed hundreds of millions of trees.
In 2018 the voting rights were transferred to the Purpose Foundation, a structure that means Ecosia can neither be sold nor pay profits out to its owners. More recently it has teamed up with France's Qwant to build a European search index of its own and lean less on Microsoft. Its market share is tiny, but the business model is an unusually direct answer to the question of who profits from your searches.