It’s really kind of amazing how the internet is enabling people to give back to charity without any real effort.  I’m sure by now most of you have heard of FreeRice.com, the vocabulary game in which for every word you correctly define, twenty grains of rice (paid for by ads placed discreetly at the bottom of the page) are donated to the UN World Food Program.  You’ve probably also seen various buttons floating around that promise to fun a whole host of different things as long as you click once a day.  I just found out about something that doesn’t even require that minimal extra effort, so I thought I’d pass it along.

GoodSearch is a search engine powered by Yahoo that donates $.01 to the participating nonprofit of your choice every time you use it.  I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and while it isn’t quite as good as Google, it’s definitely sufficient for what I usually use Google for.  A penny might not seem like much, but it really does add up.  The nonprofit I’ve selected, The Office Of Letters and Light (which runs NaNoWriMo, which you’ve seen me mention in previous entries), has already raised $30.11 for the month of December — that’s the past two days alone.  Since June, when the program started, it’s raised $773.84, which is quite a chunk of change for something that takes absolutely no effort at all.

Here’s a list of all the participating nonprofit organizations that you can raise money for just by using a different search engine.  I really think it’s worth checking out.