Google are, in business terms, getting better at improving their efficiency and being transparent about their environmental impact. Promoting the collective impact of searches, searchers and search enginesĮcosia succeeds in reminding its users that curbing the environmental cost of data and digital activities is not the sole responsibility of search engines. While it might be tempting to think Ecosia’s user base is tiny, the company itself boasts of having more than 7m active users – a number which is not to overlooked. Nor even can it be seen to take a chunk of things in its domestic market Germany where Google, Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, t-online and Yandex are all favoured by users, figures by StatCounter have shown. In terms of hard market share, Ecosia doesn’t make a dent in global terms.

But, arguably, its differences aren’t massively noticeable to the casual user – particularly if that user is used to seeing ads and not too familiar with the plethora of rich features Google increasingly offers. Users aren’t going to get as rich and efficient a search experience using Ecosia compared to Google or even Bing. Google’s self-reflection on its carbon footprint and efficiency should be lauded – but perhaps where competitors like Ecosia and tools like CO2GLE are important are in highlighting the environmental impact of searches and search users, rather than the impact of the businesses running the engines. It has also been increasingly transparent as writers and researchers have become more probing about the environmental impact of data. It seems that Google has been proactive in improving its environmental impact since before the launch of Ecosia.

Their most recent Environmental Report also highlights the market-leading efficiency of Google data centers, proclaiming: ‘on average, a Google data center uses 50% less energy than a typical data center.’ They also announced they would buy enough renewable energy in 2017 to match 100% of their global consumption for operations.Įnvironmental concerns and sustainability are touted as core values for the search giant.

In 2016 Google celebrated their tenth year of being carbon neutral. Thanks to competitors such as Ecosia, it puts increased pressure on Google to keep its environmental cost in check. That said, Ecosia still has some work to do in competing with Bing and Google’s rich features, such as ‘Shop for…’ image packs when focusing in on sponsored results alone. Although, with further searches made across all three engines the difference between ad quantity becomes less noticeable. There’s something a little odd about using a search engine which is so environmentally virtuous, but which is also so ad-heavy. While Ecosia still uses Bing results and ads, it lags behind both Bing and Google for intuitive rich SERPs. Interestingly, this is quite different to the SERPs allocation on Bing which reserves sponsored listings for the foot of the page and favours a rich knowledge graph on the right-hand side – far more similar to what we see on Google. Bing accounts for the ads that appear on the service, while both Bing and Ecosia have a part to play in the organic algorithm.Īn example search for ‘car’ sees all the above-the-fold results on Ecosia being accounted for by ads (three in position 0 and three in the right-hand sidebar). Much of the engine itself is powered by Bing, although you need to make a search and scroll to the foot of the SERPs to discover this. SERPs are delivered with blue links on a white background, green URLs appear alongside them, as well as short descriptions of each page. How Ecosia compares with Google and Bing for usabilityĪt first sight, Ecosia is very similar to Google. Estimates from other sources have varied too but what matters is that more people are making searches more often than ever before. This is down from Google’s own estimate in 2009 that each search produces around 20g. Moll’s estimate is that each search produces 10g CO2. It’s amazing to see the CO2GLE ticker creep up to around 100,000 Kg in just a few minutes. When we can quantify and visualize what that impact is, we can really begin to process things. But performing a search is such a quick and simple task that we don’t turn our thoughts to the pollution we’ve just caused. The notion that search has an impact on the environment is not particularly surprising. Market Research Data-Driven Market Research and Competitive Analysis

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