GoodTree

www.goodtree.com

GoodTree is a search engine. It’s a little different though: everytime you click ‘Search’, it donates money to charity. Yep – googling around the internet can do some good in the world!

If you use it often enough and get enough friends to do the same, you will raise some serious money. And you get to choose where the money you earn gets directed. If you’re obsessed by the environment, all your money will be given to respected environmental charities.

Is it any good?

The people behind GoodTree are businessmen: they want your money. And with the pressures of the market in mind, they’ve therefore made a good service. The search engine is no worse than the others. When you search, it runs through Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AskJeeves. It’s also a home page. You can arrange your favourite links, like your newspaper, myspace, and ActNow (of course) on the front.

It isn’t perfect though. There isn’t an Australian search engine yet, and you can’t search for video. The biggest problem is that you can’t support Australian based charities – but the ones GoodTree donate to do great work anyway.

How does this make a difference?

There’s a lot of money being made on the internet. The people at GoodTree reckon that charities should be getting their fair share of it – and they will. The founders of GoodTree are ‘Social Entrepreneurs’. They have the passion of charity, but the resolve of a business. It has the potential to raise millions for charity. They plan to donate 50 percent of the money they generate to charity.

At the moment, each time you search you donate about 1.3 cents ($A) to charity. If you search 10 times a day, for 6 months, you earn over $23. If you can rope in twenty friends…well, enough maths, but it’s a fair bit of money.