A staggering 8.5 billion searches were conducted worldwide today.
Every ‘search’ travels to a data centre, triggers a cluster of servers to fetch, rank and return
results and draws a small but measurable amount of electricity in the process. Google estimates
each search consumes around 0.3 watt-hours of energy and produces roughly 0.2 grams of
CO2. That’s an eyewatering 620,000 tonnes of CO2 emitted every year! That doesn’t include the
new wave of AI-powered answers that Google and Bing put on every results page. Current
research suggests this could take between ten to fifty times more computing power than a
traditional keyword search. It’s unbelievable!
The good news is that switching your search engine costs nothing, takes a couple of minutes,
and for some choices, actively funds environmental restoration.
Ecosia: The Search Engine That Plants Trees
Ecosia is a European search engine that donates at least 80 per cent of its advertising profits to
tree-planting programmes worldwide. Since 2009, it has funded the planting of over 200 million
trees across more than 35 countries. On average, around 45 searches on Ecosia generates
enough advertising income to plant one tree. The company runs its operations on renewable
energy and publishes monthly reports showing exactly where the money goes. The search
results themselves are powered by Bing, which means the quality is generally close to what
most people are already used to. For Horsforth residents who search the internet an average of
four or five times a day, switching to Ecosia would contribute to planting roughly 30 to 40 trees
per person per year, at no cost to you whatsoever.
DuckDuckGo: No AI Search!
DuckDuckGo gives you a choice. Regular DuckDuckGo includes an AI overlay called Search
Assist but you can configure it so it doesn’t appear, appears on demand, or not at all. Better still,
visiting noai.duckduckgo.com takes you straight to a version of the search engine without AI.
The page is unambiguous about it: “Search privately without AI.” For anyone who wants a clean,
fast, traditional search result, this is the most direct route available from any major search
provider.
OceanHero: Collecting Plastic While You Search
OceanHero is a Dutch search engine that funds the recovery of ocean-bound plastic through its
advertising revenue. Every five searches generates enough income to remove one plastic bottle
from coastal communities in Indonesia, the Philippines and Brazil before it reaches the sea.
OceanHero is privacy-focused and carbon neutral in its operations. Like Ecosia and
DuckDuckGo, the results draw on Bing’s index, so the quality is reliable. It is a more specialised
choice but offers a second cause to support without just by changing to their search engine.
Horsforth has around 8,866 households. If every household switched to Ecosia and made an
average of five searches a day across all devices in the home, the community would collectively generate enough income for Ecosia to plant roughly 360,000 trees a year. At a conservative
estimate of 25 kilograms of CO2 absorbed per tree per year, that represents approximately
9,000 tonnes of CO2 removed annually, the equivalent of taking around 2,000 cars off the road!
Your Challenge!
Pick your environmental cause – Oceans or trees. Switch your default search Here is how to do
it on the two most common browsers:
On Google Chrome: Visit ecosia.org or duckduckgo.com directly, both offer a one-click button
to add themselves to Chrome from their homepage.
On Safari (iPhone or Mac): On an iPhone, go to Settings, scroll down to Safari, and tap
“Search Engine.” On a Mac, open Safari, go to Safari → Settings → Search, and use the
“Search engine” dropdown. Both give you a short list to choose from; Ecosia and DuckDuckGo
are included by default on recent versions of Safari.
The planet does not need us to search less.
It just needs us to search smarter!