Search Engines Serving A Charitable Purpose

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If your daily web habits are anything like mine you’re using a search engine at least a dozen times a day. Often more. What if you could do something to help others with all of those searches? That’s the purpose of a rapidly expanding type of search engine: those which donate a portion of their advertising income to charitable purposes.

How do they work?

You use a charitable search engine just like you’d use Google. Alongside your search results, the engine will display context-related ads. The search engine earns money from those ads and turns around and donates a percentage of it to charity. The precise percentage varies from 30% for some to 100% for others.

Can I pick my charity?

Yes, maybe and no. Some charitable search engines do allow a user to designate a specific charitable purpose. For instance, GoodSearch specifically asks users to enter the charity they want to support and verifies its existence. (There are also easy steps to make GoodSearch your default search engine in IE, Firefox or on your Mac.) Other charitable search engines either rotate donations through their own list of selected charities or ask their user community to select a new charity each month.

What charitable search engines do you recommend?

I’m a big fan of GoodSearch primarily because it’s an attractive interface that returns highly relevant results. Other favorites include:

1. Clicks4Cancer - When I want to shop on the web, this is the place where I start. For every purchase made after following an advertiser link (e.g., Amazon, eBay and iTunes) they donate 70% of their commission to one of their cancer-related charitable organizations. That’s shopping I can feel good about!
2. SearchKindly - Basically a Google interface, SearchKindly donates to charity every single penny generated by ad revenue. Every one. On top of that, they regularly post their earnings and donations status to keep users informed. Charities are selected by user polls.
3. Search and Give - Powered by Microsoft’s Live Search, this site lets registered users select their own charities to support and tracks their donations. Donations are made annually to a user’s selected charity. Every search earns a penny for your cause, which might not sound like much until you think about how many searches the average blogger performs in a year. That can seriously add up!

This is not an exhaustive list, of course, but simply the charitable search engines I use most. Want to find others? Click on one of those links and search for them yourself. You’ll be doing something good for someone while you do.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under Blogger Toolbox. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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Tagged in: charitable organizations | charitable purposes | donations | search engines

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