Ten Minutes With Ripple May 9, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in charity, search.trackback
Intro: Ripple is a Melbourne-based charity that uses revenue from ads to help charities. You don’t give any money — you just view an ad — or set ripple as your home page.
Exec Sum: Great idea, and works well. Do it.
My tenminut.es: Nicely designed site, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do and whether I had to cough up money. I didn’t and you don’t. Either you click on one of four boxes denoting charities (water, food, education or money) and then view an ad before scrolling down to the Google search box. Alternatively set ripple as your home page and do your Google searches from there: a portion of any ad money made from your search goes to ripple which passes it all on to the charities.
Setting ripple as your home page in Firefox is easy: Just drag the icon to the homepage icon on your toolbar. Or you can download a ripple Searchbar.
Verdict: Beautifully simple and effective way to help charity. Only nag: One ad didn’t appear. Otherwise seamless, and nice to look at, too.
Score: 9 out of 10
This is a great idea.
I first was exposed to it as implemented by Good Search (www.goodsearch.com), which now has over 35,000 charities for which your search clicks can benefit!
Google should be proud. “Do no evil.” Sounds great, but “Do some good” seems even better. Maybe GOOG should implement a similar program themselves?
-Tim
I like it too, though I’d like to know how they choose the charities they promote.
I wonder if you have had a chance (if you have an interest that is!) to check out http://www.sixdegrees.org/ which is a site intended to give people an opportunity to donate to a million (so they say) charities on line. I’d be interested to know what you think of it…
Hi,
Thanks for the link. We really appreciate all the support we’ve had from the blogosphere in our first 10 days!
Please send us any feedback on the site…we’re keen to make it as good as it can be.
[...] is great one (tip of hat to Lifehack) because it’s already working. By doing your search through Melbourne-based ripple, and looking at an ad, you direct the cents your eyeballs earn to charity. A few hours after launch [...]