GoodSearch: Doing Good, One Search At A Time
by Celine Ruben-Salama, New York, NY 
on 11. 8.06
We recently learned about GoodTree the search engine that allows you to raise money for charity while browsing the internet as you normally would. GoodSearch is another alternative that works similarly. Founded on the premise that people really want to support and feel connected to their favorite charities but don't always have the time or money to do so, GoodSearch makes it easy.
GoodSearch works just as well as any other search engine, its results are powered by Yahoo!. The only difference is that 50% of the entire advertising revenue generated by the company goes to charity. While GoodTree focuses on "Blue Chip" charities, over 20,000 nonprofits are now actively generating revenue via GoodSearch. In a quick search for my fav eco charities I successfully found: Scenic Hudson Inc., the NRDC, the WWF, Environmental Advocates of New York and many more.
More than 100 charities and schools are registering daily. If the non-profit you would like to raise money for is not in the list, simply add it, promote it, search away and watch how quickly the funds rack up!
GoodSearch is a collaboration between brother and sister power team JJ and Ken Ramberg. Ken, an avid philanthropist, founder and CEO of JOBTRAK (which sold to Monster.com.) and JJ Ramberg a Stanford MBA, Internet entrepreneur, television reporter and microfinance professional dedicated the site to their mother who passed away from cancer a few years ago.
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A GoodSearch search results only show you advertisers links. You won't get results from any website that isn't advertising with Google, Yahoo, etc. So it doesn't actually work like "any other search engine". That's ok, but kind of important to know before you use it to do research. From what I can tell, the way GoodSearch makes money is by encouraging people to click on the ads that they displaying as "search results".
It seems a wee bit fraudulant to me, and may violate Google's AdSense programs policy (which says that you can't "draw attention to" the ads you display on a website, or encourage people to click on them, but I don't really know enough about it to say, and maybe they struck a deal with Google, Yahoo, et. al to be able to do this legitimately.
Hi Celine,
I just wanted to let you know that GoodSearch isn't the only donate-for-free search engine out there. A few months ago, a couple friends and I started a non-profit organization around the idea of a search engine that donates money to charity. We're kind of small right now, but we are vastly superior to GoodSearch in two very important ways.
The biggest reason that we are better than those other guys is because we give away ALL of our ad revenue to charity. Unlike GoodSearch, we don't keep half for ourselves; every single penny is given away to charity. And the other reason that we're better is because we're using Google for our searches--GoodSearch uses Yahoo, which doesn't always yield the most relevant search results.
I know that it sounds like I'm bashing GoodSearch, but I'm really not--I'm just really enthusiastic about Search Kindly and I think we're offering something that is better than the competition. My hat's off to GoodSearch for being able to raise as much money as they have, but wouldn't it be even better if all of the money that they raised went to charity? This month we're supporting the Save Darfur Coalition, so if you could mention Search Kindly (or review and compare it to GoodSearch) for your next article, I'm sure it would go a long way to spread the word about both Search Kindly and raise awareness about the atrocities in Darfur.
Thanks,
Syed