Searching for a cause?
By Matt Rebeiro August 10th, 2007
In Fundraising · Stories
The planet is melting - I know this to be true because Al Gore told me, in a movie, about penguins. Come to think of it - didn’t Morgan Freeman do the voiceover…? However, whilst global warming is a highly contentious issue with beards on one side and Jeremy Clarkson on the other it is the case that saving electricity results in a shorter electrcity bill. This, I care about. So, you can imagine my delight when I happened across Blackle. Its Google - but black. You get exactly the same search results as using white Google but it saves energy because a black screen uses less energy than a white one. So far Blackle has saved over 140 million watt hours. Which is great.
If, however, you are a seal clubbing, penguin eating, gas guzzling Jeremy Schwarzenegger type all is not lost. You can still do some good in this world: GoodSearch is a Yahoo! powered search engine that gives half of the money from each pay-per-click search to a charity of your choosing. There are 40,000 charities to choose from so you really have no excuse not to… So, everytime you search with GoodSearch $0.50 goes to a charity of your choice. How lovely.
But I’ve been thinking: the prevailing zeitgeist of web 2.0 mashup suggests to me that its only a matter of time before someone amalgamates these two ideas to create some kind of planet saving super searcher. And that’d be nice.
1 Mat Morrison // Aug 11, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Not so fast, Mr Rebeiro. Only half the revenues from paid search. That is — if you click on a paid result, the charity will receive half the revenues that GoodSearch earns on the paid links only
Good post, though. Even includes the phrase “zeitgeist of web 2.0 mashup”.