Forestle

» see forestle.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Changing your default search engine is one of the hardest habits on the internet to break, which is the structural problem every alternative has run into, and Forestle had it worse than most. It never shipped a Turkish front end and it did not reach me. What follows is reconstruction from the record.

Christian Kroll was twenty-five and living in Wittenberg when he built it in 2008. The promise was arithmetic: every search you ran protected roughly a tenth of a square meter of rainforest, because 90 percent of the advertising revenue went to the Adopt an Acre program at The Nature Conservancy. The remaining tenth covered running costs and bought renewable energy certificates to offset the electricity of the servers and of your own computer while you searched.

It worked, in the small way these things work. Around 4,000 searches a day in December 2008 became more than 24,000 by February 2009 after a large German newspaper wrote about it, and by December 2009 the site was doing over 200,000 a day. About 2.91 million square meters of rainforest had been paid for by 9 December 2009, and that figure was around 9.25 million by 20 November 2010. It picked up the Utopia Award for sustainable organizations on 27 November 2009.

Some of it was genuinely ahead of the field. Forestle put a thumbnail preview of every result on the results page years before that was ordinary, and it had an indicator syntax where typing Wikipedia followed by two colons and a phrase searched inside Wikipedia rather than the whole web. The language followed the country version you were on, so the German front end sent you to German Wikipedia without being told.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the four days ~

The results were never Forestle's own. It ran on Google Custom Search, and Google revoked its access after four days over a disagreement about whether the terms of service were being broken. Forestle first said Google had given no reason at all, then posted that Google had contacted them and explained. The two accounts have never been reconciled and the details are still argued over.

The reading at the time, in Forestle's telling and in the German coverage, was that a nonprofit reselling Google results with an environmental promise attached looked to Google like a competitive problem rather than a policy one. Whatever the reason, it moved to Yahoo and the sponsored links came from there instead. The event is small and the lesson is not: an alternative search engine that does not own an index is a coat of paint on somebody else's business, and that somebody can end it in an afternoon.

~ what it became ~

Kroll launched Ecosia in Berlin in December 2009, while Forestle was at its busiest, this time planting trees rather than buying protection for existing forest, with Bing and Yahoo behind the results. For roughly a year the two ran side by side under the same person. On 1 January 2011 Forestle was discontinued and forestle.org sent everyone who arrived to Ecosia.

Ecosia is still running in 2026 and Forestle is a redirect nobody follows any more. This is one of the rare graves where the thing that killed the product was the product's own second attempt, and where the second attempt is the one that lasted. The idea survived intact. Only the first name for it went in the ground.

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