German consumer watchdog Stiftung Warentest recently ranked Ecosia as the third best search engine in Germany after Startpage and Google based on quality of results, ease of use and privacy policies.Īdvertising revenues are split between Bing and Ecosia. The Berlin company uses the technology behind Microsoft's Bing, which also handles the advertising and ensures good search results. To this day, he doesn't speak positively of the tech giant and its "dangerous global power," even if he says he has "enormous respect, because they are simply very smart." His follow-up project, Ecosia, follows a similar principle - his company didn't develop the search algorithms either. Kroll wrote on the Forestle website at the time that the project seemed to have become too successful too fast for market leader Google. It accused Forestle of encouraging its users to click on ads they weren't necessarily interested in to maximize donations, which violated the company's rules. The last two letters were an homage to Google, which initially partnered with Kroll, only to end the collaboration a few days later by email. In 2008, he founded Forestle, his first green search engine. Friedman's bestseller, "Hot, Flat and Crowded," which called for a "green revolution." One figure from the book stuck in Kroll's head: That 20 percent of CO2 emissions can be traced to deforestation. "There was barely any internet, hardly any electricity, there were cultural barriers and the project ended quickly," he recalls.Īt some point, he read Thomas L. He set up his office between two neighborhoods because there was often only electricity in one of the two. In Nepal, he tried to build his first search engine as a "social project" with local employees. With his thesis packed in his luggage, he flew to Kathmandu and traveled to Mount Everest base camp. He says his conversion from economist to ecologist happened when he was at college. He moved to Nuremberg to study business administration because it was home to renowned financial market experts. Kroll seemed to be on a path to becoming an investment banker. "For a time, I invested in a Ukrainian oil company and in a Georgian supermarket company," he says, smiling. As a teenager, he closely followed the boom in the Neuer Markt, a segment of the German stock market focusing on New Economy companies in the 1990s, and bought his first stocks. He sold CD-ROMs in his schoolyard, and soon became fascinated by the stock market. Kroll got interested in computers at a young age - and in how to make money from them. Is that not utopian in a time in which a net 10 billion trees vanish every year? "If Ecosia made as much profit as Google," Kroll says, soberly, "we could plant the trillion trees on our own over the next 20 years." The founder bases his argument on, among other things, a recent study by ETH Zurich University that describes reforestation as the most inexpensive and effective method for saving the climate. SPIEGEL Media Menü SPIEGEL Media aufklappen.Alle Magazine Menü Alle Magazine aufklappen.SPIEGEL-Heft Menü SPIEGEL-Heft aufklappen.Gutscheine Anzeige Menü Gutscheine aufklappen.Marktplatz Anzeige Menü Marktplatz aufklappen.Wissenschaft Menü Wissenschaft aufklappen.Formel 1 – Liveticker, Kalender, WM-Stand.
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