Well, saving the environment from the comfort of our computer chairs felt good while it lasted. Google has ended its partnership with "green" search engine Forestle, saying that the site offered "incentives to click artificially on sponsored links." Forestle says that it is attempting to "clarify" the issue and get the site reactivated, but for now, we'll all have to put our environmentally-conscious searching on hold.
Forestle was forced to pull the plug late last week, only four days after it went public. When we wrote about the site at the beginning of the week, we noted that the search engine delivered results through Google and that money was made by offering sponsored advertising links at the top of each results page. Forestle said that it was donating all of the site's income from these sponsored links—minus administrative costs—to the Nature Conservancy's Adopt an Acre program that helps to sustain the world's Rainforests.
As a result, 0.1 square yards of Rainforest were "saved" with every single web search. As of last Monday, that total was more than 15,000 square yards of Rainforest saved, and Forestle says that on Wednesday alone (one day before shutdown), it saved 4,000 more square meters. (We're not entirely sure why the sudden change to the metric system.)
Forestle insists that, despite what Google thinks, it did not offer incentives to click on sponsored links or ads. At the top of every search result page, the company displayed a note explicitly saying not to click on Google sponsored links unless users are truly interested in them. "You harm Forestle, Google and the advertising websites with artificial clicking," reads the warning. Apparently that's not enough for Google, though, and perhaps the only incentive required to pull the plug is the mere admission that Forestle was making money on advertising that it planned to donate to charity.
"In our opinion Google ended the partnership, because Forestle became too successful," Forestle now writes on its home page. The company is asking users and bloggers to rally to bring Forestle back, but in the meantime, the company urges users to check out Znout, another eco-friendly search engine. Although Znout doesn't claim to donate money to green charities like Forestle did, it attempts to reduce energy consumption with the use of black backgrounds (thus reducing the amount of light needed to use it on your monitor) and EcoServers. Like Forestle, Znout has plugins available for Firefox, Opera, and Safari if you want to add it to your list of search engines available from the browser bar.
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