Ecosia is a new (as of december 2009) eco-friendly search engine. The choice of a search provider may not seem like the biggest one you are making in the course of a day, but imagine the hellofalot of searches you do in a year – even a small difference in, say, energy consumption or investment of revenue becomes substantial when scaled up.
The fact that web search is big business is no secret, and frankly I’m happier with the profits ending up in a non-profit than with stock brokers.
As far as I have been able to make out, Ecosia’s algorithms are provided by Yahoo and Bing, but the data grinding is powered with renewable energy (like Murmeldyr!) and all profits from the sponsored links go to a WWF program for rainforest protection.
The search page is beautiful, and by hitting “install” you can get it in your search bar (not an annoying separate line, but the search function you probably already have in the header of your browser). I’d say this one is a no-brainer; just simply do it.
And now for the real gem: Search for murmeldyr on Ecosia, and murmeldyr.yirdfast.no comes up first. (Do the same on Google and it’s on a boring page 40-something) Mind you, I did the search before writing this post.