green internet

Can Search Engines Save the Planet?

jplatt — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Last month, I wrote about GoodSearch, a search engine that donates 50% of its ad revenue to charitable causes. Each GoodSearch user picks the cause or charity that matters to them (from a list of 59,000) and every search they make then generates a penny or so for the charity.

Now comes word of a similar service: EcoSearch.org. Like GoodSearch, EcoSearch donates money to charities for every search you make. Unlike GoodSearch, it has a more focused donation plan (hence the name), one geared specifically to green causes.

EcoSearch Executive Director David Krasnow says that EcoSearch donates all profits from its ad revenues to charity. So far they have made donations to the NRDC, the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Alliance, and others. Not a bad start.

EcoSearch search results come from Google, which also provides the ads that appear on every search-result page. The company says each search generates around 2.1 cents for charity, and they hope to draw a million searches a day by the end of this year.

Search is the killer ap of the Internet, so it's nice to see some growth coming from it as well.

Do Green Good Every Time You Search the Internet

jplatt — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:00:00 -0400

My brother works for a small theatre, and they get some of their funding from an unusual source: a search engine.

Like some 59,000 other non-profits -- including hundreds of environmental organizations -- my brother's theatre is signed up on GoodSearch, a search engine that generates income for organizations with every search.

Here's how it works: You visit GoodSearch and first do a search for a charity that matters to you. You could pick the WWF, StopGlobalWarming.org, Bat Conservation International, or American Forests to name just a few. Once you find the charity you want, click verify. After that, every search you make on GoodSearch generates a donation for your chosen charity.

The funds come from advertising on search results, the same formula that has made Google a multi-billion dollar company. But GoodSearch donates 50% of its search revenues to charities and schools. The company estimates that every search sends 1 cent to a charity. That may not seem like much, but if 100 people support a charity and search just one time a day, that sends $365 a year to that charity.

(And if you're a web power-user like me, and you search a few dozen times an hour for your work, the donations really add up!)

GoodSearch's search results are powered by Yahoo, the number 2 search engine, so they're pretty reliable. And for charities, the funds are like found money.

Give it a try! Who knows, you might never Google again...

Web Browser Gives Back to Green Causes

jplatt — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:00:00 -0400

More than 50% of web surfers today use a version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Another 40% use Mozilla Firefox. But did you know that there are other alternatives -- and that one of them is greener than all the rest?

Flock Eco is a green-minded version of the new Flock web browser. Like its base edition, Flock Eco is billed as a "social web browser." Instead of having a traditional "home page," the Flock browser pulls in content from your friends and your favorite news sites. You can use it to automatically follow people on Fickr, Twitter and Facebook, and to get the RSS feeds you want.

The Flock Eco version is perfectly built for greenies like you and me. It comes with feeds from Grist, Treehugger, Planetgreen and others built right in. The browser is like a one-stop-shop for environmental news and content. It also comes with tools for green blogging.

Plus, Flock Eco has a built-in search engine (powered by Yahoo), and Flock gives back 10% of its proceeds from every search to environmental causes -- causes which will be chosed each year by its users.

Flock is free, and a worthy alternative to something that you use all the time anyway.