You Search They Plant

“What on earth is the full form of this acronym I have literally zero clue. Let me look it up online real quick.”

“Okay so into the soil this sapling goes, a few days later I’ll monitor its growth.”

These two monologues obviously have very different backstories and context. But what links these two monologues is an exceptionally innovative business idea- a search engine that plants trees for every search done on its platform.

The search engine I am talking about is ecosia.org. Founded in 2009, this social business was based on a post-vacation realisation: deforestation is an extremely serious problem and needs to be tackled in a comprehensive and inclusive way. Accordingly, Ecosia integrates tree plantation into business functioning rather than just CSR; while, at the same time, allowing users from all over the world to contribute to the tree plantation by doing nothing but looking up things on the internet. The beauty of this business model lies in its simplicity- our fingers type and search, their hands meanwhile dig and plant.

The moment I heard of this search engine I knew that this search engine, on account of its ingenious and sustainable model, deserves more mainstream awareness. I decided to do my bit by trying Ecosia out for myself and expressing my thoughts on it.

I began with compiling a list of search terms. These search terms must include various things that one usually looks up online. These included: a fact, a product, a word meaning and news. I also included illegal song downloads as a part of search terms, to observe how stringent is Ecosia on them. Accordingly, listed below are my search terms

1) GRE validity

2) coffee flavour Hide and Seek India

3) meaning of promulgate

4) coronavirus latest news

5) * illegal song download *

6) 1 mile is how many metres

7) distance between Hong Kong and Sydney

The parameters on which I evaluated my experience, are as follows:

Look and Feel

Something very distinctive about Ecosia, is a live counter showing the number of trees planted through Ecosia searches.

Ecosia also is rather interactive and welcoming to the user in its own way-its page has links to Ecosia Blog, About Us, Ecosia Shop (which features some really pretty merchandise by the way) and other such links. This adds a personal touch to the Ecosia website. It also provides information about its eco-conscious causes and functioning.

Speed of loading

Ecosia is extremely fast as far as loading of content is concerned. This is indeed a boon for our time-starved lifestyles.

Relevance of results

Ecosia shows fairly relevant results; however, I feel that it could do more to make its results more relevant. One thing to note: Ecosia is not very restrictive on illegal music downloads. Search engines sometimes block illegal music downloading websites for legal reasons, but Ecosia seems to have no such restrictions currently.

Ease of information access

Ecosia makes certain information easily accessible. For instance it yields highlighted answers for basic content like unit measurements. Sometimes it also highlights certain other types of content like news, videos or factual content, other times clicking the 'More' button will help. However, I can't deny that the 'relevance of results' factor as described above, might hamper with the quality of highlighted search results.

Concluding Thoughts...

Overall, Ecosia, based on the above parameters, might not seem very competent as a search engine. I feel that over time, as Ecosia gains a bigger customer base, it wil be equipped with more resources-both in terms of capital and customer insights- which will help tailor its services better. Thus while Ecosia isn’t the best search engine today, it is its customer base which will determine how good it becomes tomorrow.

Rating? 3.5/5

In my opinion, one is free to decide what search engine they want based on their search requirements; but, if one could plant trees for each small, simple search they could do, then Ecosia could go a long way in helping people bridge the gap between their eco-conscious mindset and eco-conscious actions.