Be GREEN while browsing the web

With the world looking at ways to be greener, the internet and the way you browse is often overlooked.

There are a number of options that you could consider, you could be ultra selective about who you buy from and only purchase from companies that are carbon neutral.

Is it possible to be greener while browsing the web?

What about all the rest of the ‘browsing’? Are there any other ways you can be green while browsing?

At TMCweb one of the things we often do is search the internet, it’s part of the process for researching new sites, keeping up to date with the latest web technologies, and general day to day website design activities. With that in mind is there any way to conduct all this browsing and searching and be a little greener?

Well we found one, and have been using it for a while now.

Before I go into detail let me ask you this:

Would you consider changing the search engine you use if there was one that plants trees each time you search?

Ecosia is a search engine that does exactly that. They will plant trees in return for your web browsing. They are also carbon neutral (like google). One of the nice things that you get if you use Ecosia is a counter in the top corner that shows you just how many trees your browsing has helped them plant. I’ve been using Ecosia now for about the last year, and have set them as my default browser on my work computer and my browsing has planted nearly 2000 trees.

I’m not saying that using other web browsers is bad, after all, I’ve currently only changed one of the computers I use to Ecosia, and even then there’s times I still find that I revert to google as I’m not getting the search results I require (Ecosia’s search partner is Bing), but I wanted to let people know that there is this option for being a little greener while doing something most people do every day, without it having a big impact to how you do it.

At the time of writing this Ecosia’s current tree count is:

You could add to that number and also do your part.

For those of you out there that use duckduckgo because you want to keep your search history to yourself. You can rest assured as Ecosia does not sell your search details, and doesn’t use external tracking tools. You can find out more here.

If you want to know how to change your default search engine then here are some helpful links:

Change default search engine in chrome.

Change default search engine in firefox.

Change default search engine in Microsoft Edge.

Change default search engine in Safari.