New search engine set to save the rainforests

A search engine dubbed the greenest in the globe is being launched to help save the Amazon rainforest.

Ecosia (www.Ecosia.org) will give away most of its income to an environmental protection project run by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Every search will save about two square meters of rainforest. Additionally the company's servers will be run by green electricity.

Ecosia was founded in Berlin and is the brainchild of a group of green-minded friends who wanted to make search engines more eco-friendly. The people behind Ecosia believe it will become the world's greenest search engine.

The company says that by turning its web searches green, internet users can reduce their carbon footprint and simultaneously help to prevent climate change by saving endangered rainforests.

Site founder Christian Kroll, 26, said: "Thanks to sponsored links, search engines earn billions every year. Ecosia believes that there is a more eco-friendly way of using these huge profits and that the money should better be used to fight global warming."

Yahoo and Bing are supporting Ecosia by providing search results and supplying it with the sponsored links needed to generate advertising revenue. Ecosia will generate most of its income from these links, which are text ads placed by companies aiming to sell their products to search engine users.

Companies pay for each click on their sponsored link and every click generates a few pennies of revenue for the search engine. Although a small percentage are real ad clicks, experts believe that market leader Google earns about one US cent from each web search in the US.

Unlike the big search engines, Ecosia will donate at least 80 per cent of its sponsored links income to the WWF rainforest protection programme in Brazil's Amazonas region.