A 'Green' Search Engine Sees Danger--and Opportunity--in the Generative AI Revolution

In the era of search wars fought between giants, it's tough to be small. Berlin-based Ecosia offers a search engine for the climate-conscious, promising to be carbon-negative by investing all of its profits into planting trees--more than 180 million of them since it launched in 2009. It's not likely to topple Google, but it has won a stable clientele of around 20 million users with that green branding and by repackaging search results from Microsoft's Bing. But after a decade of little change in the search business, everything is now in flux, thanks to generative AI. "I've never seen so much change in the market as in the last six months," says Christian Kroll, Ecosia's CEO. The tumult has forced Ecosia to rethink its business plan in order to compete with new chatbot-like search engines built on large language models.