Save the Rainforest with Green Search Engines

Have you ever been searching the web and thought to yourself “self, I sure wish I could do more to help the environment, but I’m stuck here at my computer all day and don’t have the time to get up and grab an organic peanut butter and jelly sandwich much less do my part to save the planet.” Well, that’s what I was thinking (work with me here I’m using creative license) just a moment ago when I stumbled upon Forestle.

Forestle is a search engine that donates 90% of its ad revenue to The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre Program each month that uses this money for the sustainable protection of rainforests. Forestle is partnered with Yahoo so all searches are basically the same results you’d get from Yahoo. After doing my part to help save a square meter of rain forest (an estimated 0.1m² of rain forest is saved for each search) it is clear that Forestle is a smooth and effective search engine with plenty of eco-cool features…

First off grab and install the search plugin for your favorite browser (Firefox, Google Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari, or SeaMonkey) along with your country of origin – there are currently 34 countries to choose from – and then test out the cool search feature using custom indicators.

Let’s say you want to search for the latest eco-friendly videos on youtube, well just type in videos::eco-friendly and kapow you get results directly from youtube! Pretty spiffy eh? Forestle currently has 19 of these custom “indicators” from Digg, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo Answers and a whole lot more.

Another slick feature is the option to turn on a small thumbnail preview of each search result next to its listing which is surprisingly speedy and quite nifty for the more visual processors among us. Top all this off with a dash of the calming green color palette and the running total of rain forest saved (611,281.6 m² at the time of this post) and you have a fun search engine that helps a great cause.

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