Will Treehoo manage to compete with Google meanwhile saving our planet?

You might think the IT industry is a very clean one from an environmental perspective, but it’s not. In fact the IT industry and the Internet are using such an amount of power that this is becoming a real issue. Data Centers where we store our servers, routers and switches to make our applications accessible are first of all using a lot of power to make all the machines operate and secondly to cool them down. If you want to do something green please support Treehoo!, the new search engine.

Years ago concerns about the IT industry power consumption arose. Fortunately it has lead to research focused on decreasing power consumption. The recently announced results by the University of Sydney about decreasing the power consumption of CPUs are for example very promising. Also initiatives by the industry to neutralize the negative side effects of this great industry are hope giving. More and more saving initiatives like The Green Grid and energy neutral hosting services, like i.e. the Dutch Evoswitch, become available, but that is far from sufficient yet.

Treehoo the first real green search engine

A great initiative I would like to promote is Treehoo, the worlds first real green search engine started (first as Heropeople.com) in March 2008. Treehoo was founded by Pedro Bentancour Garin, Ph.D. student at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Treehoo aims to earn on ad and affiliate sales revenues to fight global warming and climate change. In total 50% of the net profit will be used to plant trees worldwide. Trees are natural air filters and for the moment they are the most (and only) effective resource we have for this task.

The remaining 50% of the profit will be used to develop Treehoo and its offerings. So far, partly thanks to the investors, they offer a search engine and a free e-mail service.

30% more trees could help us solving today’s climate issues

Treehoo estimates that we need to plant approximately 130 billion trees to sequester the surplus of carbon that has been emitted into the atmosphere since the beginning of the 19th century. This doesn’t seem to be an impossible task knowing there are some 400 billion trees growing on our Planet today, according to estimations made by NASA. This would mean that we need to extend the current amount of forests with some 30 %.

Will Treehoo be able to gain significant market share?

Knowing the power behind Bing, Google, Yahoo and many others it won’t be easy for Treehoo to gain significant market share, unless we all give them a chance. I gave Treehoo a chance and I conclude that their search results are quite accurate. For the preparation of this post I even found better links for the key words: “data center power consumption” then I found with other search engines.

Candidate for the Globe Forum Innovation award

Treehoo has been chosen as one of the best 100 global sustainable innovations by this years Globe Forum and has also been awarded with the “Globe Forum Facilitator Program” to help it become successful. They will be present at this week’s Globe Forum Innovation Summit in Gdańsk and for sure I will try to meet with them there.

We kindly invite you to leave a comment on this post below.