They even go as far as to say “getting rid of the Ecosia virus”, which is just absurd to me. They claim that Ecosia may hijack your search results and place ads in them… ummm yeah that’s exactly the point, we’re trying to pay for trees here! But they do it in no way different than when Google places ads in your search results, Google just dishes out the profits to their investors instead of planting trees. While you can’t really dispute the claims made by 2Spyware, just keep in mind that literally everything they criticize about Ecosia is also true for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and any other search engine you use. But given the track record of the team at Ecosia I’m pretty confident they aren’t out to scam people.Įcosia does however get criticism from a few sites online, including an article from 2Spyware claiming that Ecosia is a browser-hijacker, and borderline virus. Ecosia after all is still a pretty small company with roughly 8 million users (although this is growing really fast).Īs far as the misleading search results or collecting data go, this isn’t really something we can test. While this is well shy of the ~1.5 trillion trees that experts say are needed to offset the carbon we’ve added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, it’s still nothing to laugh at. In 2019 Ecosia claims to have surpassed 65 million trees planted. I think the big concern here is that they might not be planting the trees they claim to be. Monitoring your data illegally with their browser extension.Offering misleading search results for their gain.Collecting user data to resell or other privacy issues.There are a few things that come to mind that they could be doing to try to mislead users if they wanted to, such as: Let’s make legitimacy the first thing we look at in this Ecosia critique because that’s the most important part. There were two major things that I wanted to learn about Ecosia: Unfortunately projects that set out to do great for the world often receive criticism, and the Ecosia search engine won’t be immune. The idea immediately clicked with me for a few reasons I’ll discuss below.Įcosia has a model that’s ripe to explode with a millennial generation that truly does care about how sustainable their products are. Conclusion on Ecosia as a Search EngineĪ few weeks ago a Dutch friend of mine introduced me to Ecosia, the Berlin-based social enterprise eco search engine that uses their profits to plant trees (that’s a mouthful).
Does Ecosia really plant all those trees?.
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