ReadWriteWeb

15 of the Best Green Search Engines

Written by Sarah Perez / April 22, 2008 9:59 AM / 11 Comments

Earth Day is a time to focus on our environmental progress and think about ways we can help protect the planet. There are a lot of ways you can take action, but one of the easiest ways is to utilize an eco-conscious search engine. In that spirit, we've rounded up fifteen of the best green search engines available on the net today.

Aplus.net

Green Maven: Green Maven is a search engine designed to specifically search the "green web." They focus on helping you find the best green, conscious, and sustainable web sites. There's also a Green Maven Firefox plugin to make those searches even easier.

Green Maven

Ecocho: Ecocho is a green search engine, which is essentially just a wrapper over Yahoo search. The site gives its users the opportunity to contribute to the purchase of carbon offsets by performing searches. For every 1000 searches, Ecocho grows two trees. They are not a charity, though - 30% of their revenue goes to running costs.

Ecocho

Blackle: Blackle takes everyone's favorite search engine, Google, and turns off the lights. By using a black background, Blacke saves energy since monitors require more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen. How much energy is saved? Blackle references a blog post that claims that a black Google would save 750 Megawatt-hours per year.

Blackle

searchgreener: Like Blackle, searchgreener has a black background to use less energy. They also donate all profits to the purchase of carbon offsets.

Searchgreener

Eco-find: Another black-background search engine, Eco-find also uses Google search.

Eco-find

Earthle: Because apparently, we can't have enough darkened engines, Earthle also conserves energy.

Earthle

EcoSeek: The tagline at EcoSeek is "the search engine for all things green," but unlike Green Maven, EcoSeek is a product search focused engine. The site helps educate buyers and connect them to eco-friendly products, manufacturers, and retailers.

EcoSeek

Greensie: Another green search engine is Greensie, whose mission is to "organize and deliver the world's best information about green." Using the bullets below the search box, you can narrow your search to web, images, news, shopping, articles, videos, jobs, audio, or blogs.

Greensie

Greenona: Greenona is yet another green-focused engine that helps you connect with green resources on the web. Their site features many stats, like a large tag cloud of the past 500 searches and the top 100 clicked results.

Greenona

Green Link Central: Another attempt at a green-focused engine is Green Link Central. This one is the Mahalo of green engines, with every link hand-picked by human editors.

Green Link Central

Green Terrior: Green Terroir is a project of Green Consensus, a nonprofit organization that participates in land trusts and offers several services including carbon neutral web hosting, agribusiness consulting, and technological support for social entrepreneurs and fair-trade cooperatives. 100% of the profits of the web site go to land conservation activities and carbon offsets.

Green Terrior

EcoSeeker: It's not the best-looking of the green engines, but EcoSeeker is a one-woman effort, which is impressive. The site, made by Susan Landes of California, is a directory that helps you find green products, services, and info.

EcoSeeker

Friends Green: Friends Green is a simple search engine wrapper, with Yahoo search as the back-end. Proceeds from searches go towards fighting global warming by funding various reforestation projects. The site also tracks the amount of rainforest they've saved at the bottom of the main page via a constantly updating ticker (3,882,253 sq ft as of now).

Friends Green

greenlinking: Greenlinking.com is a search engine wrapper that lets you search using Google alone or by using the results from Yahoo, ninemsn, and Google combined. The site purchases carbon credits via Carbon Planet with the revenue they earn, which averages to an offset of 20 kg of greenhouse gases per user per month.

Greenlinking

ClimateGift: More than just a search engine, ClimateGift is an engine and portal for green content. When you first visit the site, you pick an organization to support before being redirected to the homepage. From then on, your chosen organization receives the money from your ad clicks. The site also functions very well as a personalized homepage, very much like iGoogle, with the ability to add tabs and content.

ClimateGift

Bonus: Google.co.uk users can add a Carbon Footprint tab to their personalized iGoogle homepage thanks to the UK Carbon Footprint Project. (Hey, where's ours?)


Comments

Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts

  1. Now it's just getting stupid.

    Posted by: jj | April 22, 2008 11:58 AM



  2. Man, how could you have missed the greatest and greenest parody of them all - iBlackle.com?

    Posted by: metapsyche.myopenid.com Author Profile Page | April 22, 2008 2:08 PM



  3. Blakle is a hype, don't truly save energy.

    Please take sometime to read the following articles:
    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackle.com
    http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-a-darkened-google-really-save-electricity-104/
    http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/search-site-cashes-in-on-ecoguilt/2007/08/01/1185647951527.html?page=2

    Posted by: Alexandre Vidal | April 22, 2008 3:18 PM



  4. But how they save energy

    Posted by: Ajay | April 22, 2008 8:12 PM



  5. all those search engines that claims about saving electricity by keeping background back are doubtful. Google says something opposite to that "One idea, suggested by the site called "Blackle" (which is not related to Google, by the way, though the site does use our custom search engine), is to reduce energy used by monitors by providing search with a black background. We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption."

    Posted by: Kevin | April 22, 2008 10:53 PM



  6. Regardless if the black screen save energy of not, these GREEN SEARCH ENGINES promote Green concepts of live which is good for everyone.

    HappyTutors.com is not about anything green but promotes lifelong learning and teaching which we think it is one kind of GREEN.

    We submited HappyTutors.ocm to GREEN MAVEN. We hope HappyTutors.com can be part of GREEN website on the NET.

    HappyTutors.com
    ~ Connect Tutors with Students & Parents ~

    Posted by: HappyTutors.com - Connect Tutors with Students & Parents | April 23, 2008 12:26 AM



  7. Thats a pretty comprehensive list Sarah.

    Posted by: Steven Finch | April 23, 2008 1:11 AM



  8. It's a great principle. If everything we do, from shopping to searching and getting around, can have a positive effect or at least a less negative effect, then we'll all be better off. Black backgrounds, though, are pure hype. If it were that simple, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Entrepreneurs need to come up with something a bit more meaningful and substantive. But we're heading in the right direction.

    Posted by: Max Gladwell | April 23, 2008 10:22 AM



  9. You guys missed Aeoogle.

    Posted by: Ross Meyer | April 23, 2008 1:38 PM



  10. You missed Everyclick! We have around 200,000 charities for you to support - have donated over £430,000 and give 50% of all our gross revenue to the charity you choose to support. Launching in the US this year an loads of exciting stuff in development...

    Posted by: Lianne Butler | April 30, 2008 12:41 AM



  11. Great list! i did not know about a few of these... but it seems to be quite redundant... a google/yahoo powered search.

    we decided to do something different. a human-fed engine to help you green anything you search for - GreenYour.com. people seem to be lovin it, but it still has a long way to go. let us know what you think.

    http://www.greenyour.com/

    Posted by: mateo | May 7, 2008 2:28 PM



RWW SPONSORS


FOLLOW @RWW ON TWITTER

ReadWriteWeb on Facebook



TEXT LINK ADS