Well, Forestle, the eco friendly search engine that donated revenue to save rainforests, was launched last week, and got some pretty good traffic. The site, which was using Google search results, was well on its way to saving some land when...pop when the plug from Google. Shutting the site down indefinitely.
Google's Rationale: It said Forestle incented people to click on sponsored links so as to raise more money and save more land. Forestle had an alternative interpretation:
Dear Forestle user,
We just received an email from Google in which they announced the end of the partnership with Forestle. They said that we offered "incentives to click artificially on sponsored links" and that this was not compliant with their policies..
Well, we don't agree with that!
We displayed a note at the top of the Forestle result page that says "only click on Google sponsored links if you are really interested in them". Also we saved 0.1 m² per search and not per click! So where did we offer incentives to click on ads?
In our opinion Google ended the partnership, because Forestle became too successful: Yesterday we earned almost 200 USD and saved more than 4,000 square meters of rainforest!
We will try to reactivate Forestle and clarify this issue. Meanwhile, we ask you to use our eco-friendly search engine www.Znout.com. Znout does not save rainforest, but it reduces your energy consumption thanks to black backgrounds and EcoServers considerably.
We will inform you with a message on www.Znout.com, when we are able to revive Forestle. So please make Znout your home page or install the Znout plugin for your browser.
Hmm. Lemme tell ya, if I were in charge of YAHOO search...
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