This is another topic that isn’t entirely geeky, it’s just super cool! In my speech class, we were supposed to choose an informational topic that would be used for our first and third speeches. I chose the search engine Ecosia!
Since I wrote a whole speech on Ecosia, I could certainly just write that here, but that would be sad and lazy of me, so I won’t. About a year prior, I found an ad for Ecosia on Facebook. Had I been entirely alert at the moment, I would probably have just ignored the ad. As it so happened, however, I was tired and bored, so I clicked on it.
I immediately became intrigued by the general basis of their site. As I said earlier, Ecosia is a search engine. Like all search engines, they make money off of ads when people search. What makes them unique, however, is what they do with that money: they use their profits to help plant trees in other countries!
I was so interested in how this worked that I went ahead and clicked through their extra info. I spent probably a good half an hour sifting through personal info, financial reports and other fun facts! I was so impressed with the work they were doing that I made it my default search engine.
Recently, they have rocketed forward in progress. They’ve planted 10 million of their 15 million total trees in this last year, as well as doubled the amount of countries they help in!
This past summer, I got to meet with their UX Designer Ina over a video chat. Since their headquarters is in Berlin, the time difference was significant, but despite having already spent about nine weeks chatting with users already, and being near the end of her work day, she seemed very excited to meet me and didn’t mind at all!
I don’t know about you, but I think that what these guys are doing here is really cool. You can follow their blog, their YouTube channel, or just use their site to help contribute! (Link to main site above) Whichever you choose, I hope you at least check Ecosia out and give it a shot!
