While Google continues to remain the search engine supremo (as per comScore), the world has witnessed the launch of search engines with a social mission - the mission of giving money to charities for each search you and me do on their search engine. And this social mission does make sense when we know that search engines generate, on an annual basis, almost six billion dollars from advertisers.

This new breed of search engines like www.goodsearch.com, www.charitycafe.com etc are in the preliminary stages of their growth and is yet to make their mark in the world of search giants like Google, Yahoo, Ask etc. Yet their potential remains high. To quote from www.goodsearch.com, “The more people use GoodSearch, the more money will be directed towards causes. There is no cap on how much money we will direct to charities”.

While the amount of money given to charity by these sites for each search seems to be negligible, the process makes sense when there are a good number of people using these sites. These sites give an opportunity for students (and others) who many a times lacks the financial support to fund their favourite social missions.

We too can support these engines in their mission.

Ajith Sankar