GoodSearch Makes Cents

 I’ve been using Yahoo-powered Goodsearch for most of my searches these days.Have you heard of it?With every search I do through Goodsearch, one penny is donated to the not-for-profit organization, church or school of my choice.I know, I know…it’s only pennies. Still, it’s more than they’ll get if I use other search engines.When you go to Goodsearch.com, there’s a spot where you type in the name of the group you’d like to benefit from your search-pennies. You click “verify,” and Goodsearch brings up the organizations that seem to fit (there may be more than one church or school by that name). You confirm it by clicking on the correct one, and then start your research. From that point on, Goodsearch will default to that organization until you change it, but you can switch organizations whenever you wish. I do a lot of searches, so it was fun to leave one organization up for a while and see that my penny-searches actually did add up pretty quickly. In fact, I would imagine that if a private school or church convinced even half of its student body (or congregation) and their families to use Goodsearch, the donated cents would accumulate quite impressively.At a practical search-engine level, I have to admit that every once in a while, Yahoo just can’t dig up what I’m looking for and I must give in and return briefly to Google and its almost telepathic search ability. But most of the time, Goodsearch has given me  exactly what I need.The concept of doing something positive in the world in such a simple way–that actually benefits me–kind of reminds me of Free Rice.A few grains of rice per vocabulary word.A few pennies per Internet search.Small, good things at a time when every little bit helps.