Forestle
Forestle was an ecologically inspired search engine created by Christian Kroll, Wittenberg, Germany, in 2008 and discontinued in 2011. Forestle supported rainforest conservation through donations of ad revenue and aimed to reduce CO2 emissions. It was briefly associated with Google before associating with Yahoo.
Forestle saves 0.1 square meters (about 0.12 square yards) of rain forest per search event. It guarantees to donate 90% of its advertisement revenue to the Adopt an Acre program of is partner organization The Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy uses these donations by Forestle to sustain rain forests. As of December 9, 2009, about 2,910,000 square meters of rain forest have been saved. As of November 20, 2010 about 9,250,000 square meters have been saved.
A Forestle search is also essentially CO2-neutral, as Forestle.org offsets the carbon-dioxide emissions caused by electricity consumed by all Forestle servers, the network infrastructure as well as the computers of each user by purchasing an equivalent amount of renewable energy certificates. The certificates are purchased from a part of the 10% of revenue left after conserving rain forest. This makes Forestle one of the few web search sites that are green certified.
The number of search requests on Forestle.org continues to increase significantly: Within two months, it increased more than sixfold from about 4,000 per day on average in December 2008 to more than 24,000 per day in February 2009. The report about Forestle in a major German newspaper end of February 2009 transiently boosted the number of search events on Forestle.org within a week (3 March 2009) close to its all-time maximum. As of December 2009, the number of search events exceeds 200,000 per day.
The degree of impact of Forestle.org and similar kinds of 'green' search engines is discussed; the (now removed) note on Forestle to not click on advertisements to 'help' achieving larger advertisement revenues was particularly criticized.
On November 27, 2009, Forestle received the Utopia Award as an exemplary organisation enabling us to live more sustainably. The Jury emphasizes that Forestle "offers a simple and strong possibility to contribute to protect existing rain forest through the use of an everyday [...] service" and that "thereby Forestle unfolds a high effectiveness and sharpens the consumers' sense for the impact of consumer behavior".
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