Ecosia, ecosia.org a new search engine which claims to save 2 square metres of rainforest with each web search officially launched a few days ago. According to the progressive display on the homepage, searches to date had notionally saved 668,000 square metres of rainforest.

According to the WWF, “On average internet users can protect about 2000 square metres of rainforest very year by using Ecosia”. Ecosia queries the Bing and Yahoo indexes and provides options for passing the query through to Google, Wikipedia and youTube. However, according to the Ecosia FAQs the commercial arrangement (and thus the revenue split) only applies to native Ecosia searches.

Check out the FAQ video. Whilst I suspect that presentation of shareholders as evil profiteers is perhaps a tad naïve, it’s an interesting idea at a time when every bit helps. If the forecasts included in the WWF press release are true, then …”If only 1% of global Internet users accessed Ecosia for their Web searches, we could save a rain forest area as big as Switzerland each year.”