Forestle was an ecologically inspired search engine created by Christian Kroll,

Wittenberg Wittenberg ( , ; Low Saxon: ''Wittenbarg''; meaning ''White Mountain''; officially Lutherstadt Wittenberg (''Luther City Wittenberg'')), is the fourth largest town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Wittenberg is situated on the River Elbe, north o ...

, Germany, in 2008 and discontinued in 2011. Forestle supported rainforest conservation through donations of ad revenue and aimed to reduce emissions. It is quite similar to the search engine

Ecosia Ecosia is a search engine based in Berlin, Germany. Ecosia considers itself a social business, claiming to be CO2-negative, supports full financial transparency and protects the privacy of its users. Ecosia is B Lab-certified, meeting its ...

, which plants new trees with its ad revenue. Forestle was briefly associated with

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

before associating with

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

Contributions to sustainability

Forestle saved 0.1 square meters (about 0.12 square yards) of

rain forest Rainforests are characterized by a closed and continuous tree canopy, moisture-dependent vegetation, the presence of epiphytes and lianas and the absence of wildfire. Rainforest can be classified as tropical rainforest or temperate rainforest ...

per search event. It guaranteed to donate 90% of its advertisement revenue to the Adopt an Acre program of is partner organization

The Nature Conservancy The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is a global environmental organization headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. it works via affiliates or branches in 79 countries and territories, as well as across every state in the US. Founded in 1951, The Nat ...

. The Nature Conservancy used these donations by Forestle to sustain rain forests. As of December 9, 2009, about 2,910,000 square meters of rain forest have been saved. As of November 20, 2010, about 9,250,000 square meters have been saved. A Forestle search was also essentially CO₂-neutral, as Forestle.org offsetted 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 certificates were purchased from a part of the 10% of revenue left after conserving rain forest. This made Forestle one of the few web search sites that are green certified. The number of search requests on Forestle.org continued to increase significantly: Within two months, it increased more than sixfold from about 4,000 per day on average in December 2008 to more than 24,000 per day in February 2009. The report about Forestle in a major German newspaper end of February 2009 transiently boosted the number of search events on Forestle.org within a week (3 March 2009) close to its all-time maximum. As of December 2009, the number of search events exceeds 200,000 per day. 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 Universal basic income (UBI) is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive an unconditional transfer payment, that is, without a means test or need to work. It would be received independently of a ...

' 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

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 given 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

later.

Discontinuation

Forestle was discontinued and redirected to a similar search engine

on January 1, 2011.

References

External links

Forestle.org
{{Web search engines navbox German websites Defunct internet search engines