Search for porn, but really, do it for the rainforest.

July 30, 2009 6:34 AM

In two days, Forestle, the eco-friendly charity search engine, will celebrate its first birthday. In just one year, it has overcome the wag of the finger from Google only to return from the grave partnering with Yahoo instead, and this month's donation will have preserved just over 1,000,000m² (or 247 acres) of rainforest, all while leaving no carbon footprint.

How does it work? Basically, the ad-revenue from "sponsored links" goes to The Nature Conservancy's "Adopt an Acre" program, and this averages out to roughly 0.1m² of rainforest preserved for every search performed. You can take it for a spin right up there in the top-right corner of your browser with their search plugin, or search from the main page.

posted by tybeet (12 comments total)

Oops: "and with this month's donation..."
posted by tybeet at 6:36 AM on July 30, 2009

I'm a bit lost as to the purpose of both this post and the company itself.

tybeet -- Why the advertisement? Why not EcoSearch.com, or ZNout.org, or Hoongle.org, or blackle.org, or any of the other search intermediaries that siphon off search revenue for different causes?

There are genuine concerns about click-fraud with these guys, even if its in the name of a good cause. I'm sure google saw non-standard clicks or searches coming through the site, and killed it just like they would any other. Maybe Yahoo thinks the good name will be worth the minimal fraud.

These just seem like silly projects by people who don't seem to add much value.

The Nature Conservancy's cool though, and they've got my money
posted by FuManchu at 8:18 AM on July 30, 2009 [1 favorite]

Why the post?

The birthday, the 1 million. Isn't the milestoned success of a thing like this post-worthy?

There are genuine concerns about click-fraud with these guys...

Click-fraud doesn't mean they're fraudulent themselves. There are tons and tons of people who engage in fraud at Freerice, for instance, but that doesn't reflect on freerice themselves, just the misguided users. About all you can do is inform users of its harm, and try to weed out the fakes.

Why not EcoSearch.com, or ZNout.org, or Hoongle.org, or blackle.org...

Well, Hoongle.org is out of service, blackle.org is just a black-themed search engine, Znout.org is merely carbon neutral, and ecosearch.com is very, very vague.

I also thought it was pretty special that Forestle only has a 10% administrative overhead, and the carbon-offsets even come out of that. The other 90% goes to preservation. Most of Forestle's peers: everyclick, goodsearch, goodtree, etc... only allocate 50% of the ad revenue to charity, and the sites are all pretty fugly to boot.
posted by tybeet at 8:42 AM on July 30, 2009

In the middle ages, there was a period in which the Catholic Church had become extremely corrupt. One of their great ideas for ways to raise money was the "indulgence".

If someone contemplated committing a sin of some kind, they could talk to the local priest, give him some money, and the priest would write out an indulgence for him, which forgave him for the sin before it happened. Then our sinner could freely sin away, with no worries for his immortal soul.

The indulgence business went into high gear after the invention of the printing press. Early printers spent a lot of time working for the church creating indulgence forms, with blank spots where the priest could fill in the name of the sinner and the sin he wanted to commit. This whole business of indulgences was one of the things that infuriated Martin Luther and led to him nailing his complaints about corruption to the door of a church.

Nowadays few are worried about that kind of thing. But modern secular liberals still buy indulgences. Only now they call them "carbon offsets".
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:12 AM on July 30, 2009 [2 favorites]

This seems like a genuinely good idea. The money that Forestle raises goes to The Nature Conservancy's Adopt an Acre program. Calling it the equivalent of middle ages indulgences is foolish. The comparison might work in reference to the shadier carbon offset companies where the majority of the money disappears before getting to any environmental cause. Here a mere 10% covers overhead and the rest goes to a great program run by a highly respected conservation organization. I'll be using Forestle.
posted by andythebean at 11:03 AM on July 30, 2009

Nowadays few are worried about that kind of thing. But modern secular liberals still buy indulgences. Only now they call them "carbon offsets".

You could easily say the same about any good deed and derring-do: that a deep guilt underlies them both and that they are driven to do good because they feel they have, or might sin, but then you're really just throwing a blanket of bleak cynicism over all good will.
posted by tybeet at 11:04 AM on July 30, 2009

I think that is a piss-poor analogy CP. In my mind it breaks down fairly quickly: one was instituted for direct monetary profit by (essentially) a political power, the other has benefits that extend to many people and is part of a non-government driven patchwork effort to ameliorate a demonstrable problem.
Guilt is not necessarily a bad thing, it can motivate people to act better than they would ordinarily. Now, the indulgence system was about avoidance of guilt, finding a way to do selfish things with no remorse, hardly comparable to carbon offsets.

Oh, and you say "secular liberals" like it is a bad thing. As annoying as some may be I'd take 500 secular liberals over one fundamentalist conservative any day of the week. At least they are not prone to blaming everything on ill-defined supernatural entities.
posted by edgeways at 11:28 AM on July 30, 2009

Except that even for the "highly regarded" companies, there's little evidence that carbon offsets will actually help [prevent / reduce the effects of] global warming. Wikipedia has a summary of some of the issues here. This isn't a "is global warming real" thing, it's a question of whether offets are valuable as a tool, if not we need to focus on other things and use the money more wisely.
posted by wildcrdj at 3:00 PM on July 30, 2009

The crux of this search engine's selling point is not that it buys carbon offsets. ZNout does that too. What's unique about this one is that is sends a great deal of money to a program that buys and protects critical habitat.
posted by andythebean at 3:38 PM on July 30, 2009

tybeet, yes, my point was that it attracts click fraud. They are trying to get money from companies based on clicks. Those companies will not like click fraud, no matter who did it.

A little context of their donations: The Nature Conservatory sells those acre plots at $50 each to individuals. That means to date, Forestle has spent a total of $12,350 on its current purchases, less if they've been getting any sort of deal from TNC. It's got a going rate of ~$2500 a month at this point, so maybe it'll keep going strong.

So even with that, I just don't see the great effectiveness of it. Assuming that 50,000 people already use Forestle, encouraging each of those users just to send a damn quarter would have been better. Hell, this guy's effort alone is probably worth a few grand.

Besides which, he's largely just duplicating Google/Yahoo's servers. His servers are no substitute for theirs, and theirs are assuredly more energy efficient. (Ignoring the issue of carbon offsets and whether they're sufficient, as that's another issue entirely).

Basically, I don't see any great added value to what this guy is doing.
It just seems like another GiveWell-type naive implementation of a me-too charity model.

There are just so many other ways he could have been more effective. Tie in Amazon Mechanical Turk with the site, and generate income from a few seconds work of all users. Generate something to get a donation campaign going. Volunteering for The Nature Conservancy. Convince Google to have a "Forestle" day and donate to TNC.
posted by FuManchu at 5:22 AM on July 31, 2009 [1 favorite]

I guess I just don't agree with your criticisms, or I see the ends as justifying the means, which I think is the essence of our disagreement here.

For instance,

Assuming that 50,000 people already use Forestle, encouraging each of those users just to send a damn quarter would have been better.

and I agree that would be fantastic and result in a larger sum, but surcharges would outweigh the donations themselves so it's not feasible. Micropayment systems have large hurdles for a reason, and so one way of looking at Forestle or other similar models is that they are the micropayment system, or at least a way of realizing of how people can involve themselves in very small, but still very measurable (and therefore meaningful), ways.

Then you mention the resource burden,

Besides which, he's largely just duplicating Google/Yahoo's servers.

But the site is only a wrapper for the API so the only processing to be done is for generating static content, storing logs of the searches, updating the counter, and then whatever algorithm is used to check logs for users "gaming" the system. All very minimal stuff.

And how it's an inferior charity model,

It just seems like another GiveWell-type naive implementation of a me-too charity model.

but I don't really understand what you mean by me-too charity model, or how that's a criticism at all. It doesn't seem to be the same as GiveWell (a meta-charity?), and it's apples-to-oranges with the alternatives that you suggest. Indeed, it would even go hand-in-hand with a group-oriented MTurk task force, with volunteering, and/or with canvassing for donations, and I agree that these are all good things and that Forestle could adopt some of them to be reach larger goals.

I guess what I do see is an elegant piece of software that, as a middle-man, redirects ad-revenue that would otherwise enter the void of Google(/Yahoo/Microsoft)'s purse, and one that involves the user in a purposeful interaction with that process, by engaging in an activity that they already do anyway, only in a slightly different way. It seems like a small sacrifice for a user to involve themselves in something larger and culturally relevant.

Now, whether you agree with that culture (liberalism/environmentalism/whatever), or The Nature Conservancy, or carbon offsets, is another issue entirely.
posted by tybeet at 9:35 AM on July 31, 2009

I simply think that an unimaginative site, one of a dozen, that has pulled in less charity than a elementary school bake sale isn't worth praising in more words than dollars they have raised. Nor is it worth a glowing FPP. Yet.

It's not an anti-liberalism/environmentalism/whatever attitude, it's an anti-"caring makes as much of a difference as the money or time we don't give" attitude.
posted by FuManchu at 7:03 PM on July 31, 2009 [1 favorite]