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.
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”.