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A new search engine is planning on reforesting the world’s oceans with every internet search you do. That’s because searches on Ekoru generate an income from sponsored links and gives 60 percent of it to its eco-friendly partners.
The search engine is partnering with Operation Posidonia, led by the University of New South Wales in Australia to help reforest the oceans by planting seagrass meadows according to a company blog on Medium.
Underground meadows of seagrass, according to Operation Posidonia, provide food and shelter for hundreds of species like seahorses and crabs and can actually capture carbon more than 40 times faster than tropical rainforests.
Seagrasses can also protect our fragile shorelines from erosion and contribute to cleaner ocean waters. That’s why this restoration project is so vitally important. Trials are already taking place in Port Stephen, Australia and are showing a 90 percent success rate and this shows how important this new partnership is to health of our waters.
Ekoru was founded by Australian tech innovator Ati Bakush and his wife Allison after they moved to Kuala Lumpur and became concerned about ocean pollution and they launched the search engine in January 2020 according to Good News Network.
“We figured that the best way to have an impact and ‘do something’ was to use our combined skill set and experience to create Ekoru to help raise money for the benefit of ocean conservation partners,” Bakush told GNN.
“We wanted to come up [with] a way that people could help without having to donate. Web searches are something which everyone does on a daily basis from their phone or computer and anyone could help make a difference just by switching from Google.”
Besides supporting ocean initiatives, Ekoru is also run very sustainably. According to the startups blog, the servers they use are located in data centers that are powered by hydro-electricity. The run of the river plant uses the natural flow of the river to generate electricity. The data center also uses air and water cooling to be as energy efficient as possible.
The normal energy cost to transmit 1 GB of data is 2.9 kWH but Ekoru has optimized their software so that it could deliver searches using less energy.
Ekoru works on all smartphones and computer extensions are available that will allow you to use the search engine on your browser. In fact, you can make it our default browser. An Android search app is available and an iPhone version will be available soon.
Ecosia, another eco-friendly search engine plants trees with every search. Ecosia has partnered with NGOs in developing countries in Africa, South America, and Indonesia. This is an easy way to help our planet one internet search at a time.
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