Forestle was an ecologically inspired
search engine created by
Christian Kroll in
Wittenberg, Germany, in 2008 and discontinued in 2011. Forestle supported rainforest conservation through donations of ad revenue and aimed to reduce emissions. It was similar to the search engine
Ecosia, which plants new trees with its ad revenue. Forestle was briefly associated with
Google before associating with
Yahoo.
Contributions to sustainability
Forestle saved 0.1 square meters (about 0.12 square yards) of
rain forest per search event. It guaranteed to donate 90% of its advertising revenue to the
Adopt an Acre program of is partner organization
The Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy used these donations by Forestle to sustain rainforests. As of December 9, 2009, about 2,910,000 square meters of rain forest have been saved.
By November 20, 2010, about 9,250,000 square meters had been saved.
A Forestle search was also essentially CO2-neutral, as Forestle.org offset 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 number of search requests on Forestle.org continued to increase significantly:
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.
Features
The site pioneered a thumbnail
website preview for all search results. Moreover, it offered a search with so-called
indicators, for instance, one could directly search for '
Basic Income' on Wikipedia (instead of the entire WWW) by typing 'Wikipedia::Basic Income'.
The language chosen for indicator search is automatically associated, so a search on the US web site http://us.Forestle.org or on the British web site http://uk.Forestle.org leads to a search on English Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org and a search on the German web site http://de.Forestle.org (or on the Austrian Website http://at.Forestle.org) leads a search on German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org. Forestle also provided several browser plugins, could be added to iGoogle and was available in English and German (full versions) as well as in Spanish and Dutch (details partially in English)..
Utopia Award
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".
Search engine partners
Forestle was associated to
Google until Google revoked the site's search functionality after four days due to a dispute over whether their terms of service were being broken. Forestle.org stated that Google had not actually provided reasons for stopping the association.
At the time, Forestle posted a message on their website stating that Google had contacted them and explained the reason for banning Forestle from using their Google Custom Search. The action by Google to not further support Forestle immediately drew international attention.
Details about the conflict between Google and Forestle are debated.
Forestle became associated with
Yahoo later.
Discontinuation
Forestle was discontinued and redirected to the similar search engine
Ecosia on January 1, 2011.
See also
-
Blackle.com
-
Ecosia
-
List of search engines
External links
