Forestle

Forestle was a search engine, or website for finding all kinds of information on the internet. Forestle gave money to save the rain forest and reduce the total carbon dioxide (CO₂) production. It also offered special features, for example a preview of the websites found during a search. It was invented in 2008.

Forestle was discontinued and redirected to a similar search engine Ecosia on January 1, 2011.

Helping the environment

Forestle saved 0.1 square meters (about 0.1 square yards) of rain forest per search. It earned money from showing advertisements along with the websites found, and Forestle guarantees to donate 90% of this money to buy areas of rain forest through its partner organization The Nature Conservancy. As of October 2009, about 1,991,055 square meters of rain forest have been saved.

For searching the web using Forestle was also essentially CO₂-neutral: Of course the server computers used by Forestle, the connection network, and the computer of the searching users need electric energy and thus create emissions of carbon-dioxide; but Forestle purchased an equivalent amount of renewable energy certificates. The certificates are purchased from a part of the 10% of money left after buying rain forest. This makes Forestle one of the few web search sites that are "green certified".

The number of search requests on Forestle.org grew significantly: There were 4000 search requests per day on average in December 2008, about 10000 per day in January 2009 and as of March 6, 2009 there were more than 20000 requests per day.

Forestle thus offered a simple alternative form of searching the web in a way that helps the environment.

How large the effects of using such a 'green' search method actually are is discussed.

Special properties

Forestle offered a website preview that showed small versions of the websites found in each search. The search page offered by Forestle was very simple and only contains a window to type in words to be searched for, the search results, and a few links to check related services (for example Google Maps) as well as explanations about how Forestle works. Forestle meanwhile also provided several browser plugins, could be added to iGoogle and could be used in English and German (full versions) as well as in Spanish and Dutch (details partially in English).

Forestle search engine partners

Forestle used the search services of Google until Google forbid them to do that after four days of service; the reasons was that Google and Forestle had a fight: it was not clear whether Forestle broke the terms of service fixed in the contract between them. Forestle.org states that Google did not actually give reasons for stopping their service. The action by Google to not support Forestle any more immediately drew international attention. Details about the conflict between Google and Forestle are debated. Forestle then became associated with Yahoo.

Other websites

• Forestle.org
• Proof for Saving Rain Forest Archived 2008-09-12 at the Wayback Machine
• Proof of reducing CO₂ production Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine