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I mean, cool, and ok, but it is kind of ridiculous to consider taking profits from your company "unethical".

And you're taking them anyway in the form of planting trees. You could have just had a normal company and taken all the profit you wanted and used it to plant trees and done the same thing. I guess this is somehow more tax-efficient, but it’s not really any different in principle.

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The difference is that the users buying the product (eye balls on search) value it differently. This means you can get your first 1m users without needing to be as much better (maybe you can even be worse) than Google as you would otherwise need to be.

It's a very interesting problem. When starting a company the biggest problem is often getting the first few users. One option is to build something people want - another is to build something your friends want - but another option is to build something the media wants to talk about.

According to Wikipedia, ecosia launched in 2009 and this is from 2018, so they must have already had traction by then.

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