Environmentally friendly. Ecological. Sustainable. Call it what you will, the drive to care for the environment has firmly departed from the exclusive realm of hippies and established itself in the mainstream. Google has dedicated itself to becoming carbon-neutral by the end of the year. But they’ll be a step behind some of our Alts, though;

Picsearch, Earthle, Eco-Search and

Gigablast have all made caring for the world we live in a cornerstone of their business philosophy.

The one with the simplest proposition is Earthle. Go to their site, and what you’ll find is a photo negative of Google, black background, text in white. The company is entirely uninterested in messing with search algorithms or results; other than the black skin, the user experience is identical to searching with Google. The company says that if everyone switched to the cooler colors, we could save more than 750 megawatt-hours per year, enough to power 77 North American homes for a full year.

Eco-Search has gone to the other extreme. They’re developing their own database, and they’ll only accept companies that meet their strict definition of environmentally friendly, which includes criteria relating to human rights, arms trading, corporate responsibility, genetic modification, social enterprise, ecological impact or animal welfare. You won’t find tobacco companies in their search results, nor cosmetics companies engaged in animal testing.

Gigablast bases its green policy on its technology. According to their website, clever software engineering allows them to serve up search results on less than 0.1% of the computer hardware, electricity, and general infrastructure required by their competitors. Imagine the difference between powering 200 servers and powering 200,000 servers, and you’ll get an idea of what they’re on about.

By far the most comprehensive environmental policy, though, can be found at Picsearch. According to Carl Särnstrand, Picsearch’s Communications Manager:

Picsearch takes four steps to fulfill its social responsibility towards energy consumption: (1) Picsearch plants 1000 new trees for every gigawatt-hour consumed; (2) Picsearch buys and holds in trust 2 acres of old growth forest for every gigawatt-hour consumed; (3) Picsearch only uses electricity that is carbon free and follows the highest standard of production; and (4) Picsearch buys carbon credits equivalent to all the energy that Picsearch consumes.

Picsearch is unique in that their sustainable stance carries a tangible cost. Carl accepts that their approach means they have to be a lot more judicious in their operations to maximize efficiency.

The policy adds 12.4 percent of the total electricity costs as an extra environmental tax. This will force Picsearch engineers to be more intelligent when it comes to designing servers and writing software. People who believe in market economy should create clear economic incitements between environmental responsibility and profit. Pure charity is good, but when your business affects the environment, you need to make the environment a part of your business.

Picsearch took on the added cost intentionally. In a March press release, CEO Robert Risberg pointed out the benefits of expensive energy:

Trying to use energy efficient computers is good, but not good enough. Picsearch believes that we need to increase the price of energy consumption so that the real environmental costs are included in the daily business activities. We call upon all colleagues in the search engine business to follow our example.

It’s long been proven that companies that adhere to a strong set of core values outperform those that don’t, and these companies are certainly living theirs. At the same time, people value different things to different extents. What’s your take on it? How near and dear to you is environmentally friendly search? Would you be willing to switch for it? I’d love to get your opinion here in the comments section.

By Kaila Colbin. Kaila blogs for VortexDNA, whose technology can improve relevance for search engines, ecommerce sites, or any other recommendation service.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Alts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.