This is our list of the best environmentally friendly search engines you should start using today if you want our planet to last.
Ecosia
We absolutely love Ecosia and have a more detailed overview of this environmentally friendly search engine for you to read elsewhere in our blog. Basically, the more searches you do, the more trees they plant. A registered B Corporation, Ecosia also publish monthly financial reports and don’t pay dividends at all. You can see what they do with the money they earn each month, take a look at their page here.
SearchScene
SearchScene are a charitable search engine designed to help fight climate change. Earning money through advertising on search results, they promised to donate 95% of their profits to charity. They even claimed you could choose the recipients of donations, which is a really interesting idea.
Search Engine Shut Down
Unfortunately, SearchScene was shut down at the end of 2021, despite having planted over 90,000 trees, provided clean drinking water for 7,000+ people and even adopted 196 polar bears and other endangered species.
As per their blog post found here, there were several circumstances that contributed to the search engine’s demise.
“[T]he level of interest was much lower than we expected, converting people from Google was much harder than we had anticipated, the cost of advertising was incredibly high, the share rate was lower than we had hoped, and the revenue from the ads that appeared on SearchScene was much lower than we thought it would be” and this makes Ecosia’s achievement of still being an important part of the search industry even greater.
SearchScene “couldn’t get much exposure from journalists because they had never heard of us, and they had never heard of us because we hadn’t got much exposure”. This is a typical catch 22 all small businesses find themselves in and is the reason a lot of environmentally friendly companies fall by the wayside.
Rapusia
This search engine is all about raising funds for a lot of social as well as environmental projects throughout the world. Rapusia includes a commitment to your privacy, keeping your personal information away from advertisers while still raising money for great causes.
Like the industry leading environmentally friendly search engine, Rapusia publush monthly financial reports so we can all hold them accountable. The South African search engine allows you to collect a heart for each search made, then once you’ve accumulated a bunch of love, you can then donate it to whatever available priject you want to finance.
Project categories include:
- Social
- Environment
- Animals
- Sport
Once environemtally friendly charity that caught our eye among the many available to support on the Rapusia website was Loliondo Actions for Green Earth, which empowers young people to make a real difference in saving our planet.
We search from the web, they save the planet.
OceanHero
This is a cool charitable search engine with many great features that pledges to collect one ocean-bound plastic bottle for every 5 searches you make.
OceanHero gamifies ocean cleanup by giving you shells earned by making searches, opening browser tabs andanswering wuestions about the ocean. Once you’ve earned 100 shells, that’s one bottle removed from the ocean.
How do they do this? OceanHero works with local partners across the globe who actually work at ground (or water) level to remove plastic waste.
However, word on the street is that OceanHero does not run on 100% renewable energy sources, which is a negative point for it. But if you want to support ocean cleanup, OceanHero is the environmentally friendly search engine for you. Perhaps one day they’ll run their servers form underwater data centres and get themselves some carbon neutral electricity providers?
https://oceanhero.today/search
YouCare
Less an environmentally friendly search engine and more a charitable search engine, you can choose the charities you want to support, so you’re free to choose environmentally friendly charities and make our environment a much better place.
YouCare help save the environment through its own use of resources, with green servers and an eco-friendly outlook to running its business.
Lilo.org
This French charitable search engine encourages you to search and thus collect droplets of water that you can then donate to your chosen charity.
Over 800,000 french people use this search engine and they pledge not to collect or resell our personal data, which is great.
Good
Another certified B Corp, this search engine formerly known as gexsi, supports organisations with 100% of its advertising revenue.
Good are carbon neutral and totally not for profit, delivering more than 500,000 search results per month. They select projects based on their ability to solve the most pressing challenges we face right now, how much they protect our environment and the power they have to drive real change.
Ekoru
Powered by hydro electricity with servers kept in a data centre that uses natural convection cooling rather than air-conditioning, Ekoru are all about saving our oceans and that’s something we can really get behind. Every search made helps to remove plastic and helps green our ocean one query at a time. Actually that should be one ad click at a time and Ekoru make sure they clearly explain this on their website.
Blue Ocean Cleanup are a majr beneficiary of support from Ekoru who help to clean up the mess our waste leaves on beaches and in the ocens themselves. Although we often think of planting trees on dry land as a great way to save the planet, Ekoru also help to refrest the ocean through their partner Operation Posidonia. Teams of divers go to the bottom of the sea to plant ocean seagrass which absorbs CO2 at a rate 40 times faster than rainforest trees!
In terms of their own green credentials, Ekoru are very up-front about exactly how much energy their searches use in comparison to other search engines. One of the ways they decrease their search impact on the environment is by delivering smaller search results pages, meaning less data use getting that page onto your device.
Start Your Engine
Ditch Google and start using one of these environmentally friendly search engines today. How about a search for the best environmentally friendly mobile phones on ecosia to get you started?
Let’s all make greener lifestyle choices.