Forestle is a search engine with the goal of saving the Rain Forests. It was built on Google Custom Search, but Google revoked the site’s search functionality claiming that Forestle offered “incentives to click artificially on sponsored links,” which is not compliant with Google’s policies.
In response, Foretle said, “Well, we don’t agree with that! We displayed a note at the top of the Forestle result page that says, ‘only click on Google sponsored links if you are really interested in them.’ Also we saved 0.1 m² per search and not per click! So where did we offer incentives to click on ads?”
Either way, their partnership with Google ended in September after just Forestle just launched out of beta in August. David Chartier at Ars Technica reports now however, that Forestle has formed a partnership with Yahoo, and it’s back and more transparent than ever.
The site still has a Googlish look and feel to it, and in fact even still links to Google for image search, maps, videos (YouTube), and News. Really, there is no evidence on the Forestle front page that the site has anything to do with Yahoo whatsoever.
“Regardless, Google apparently never had a change of heart, so Forestle forged a two-year partnership with Yahoo and is back with a handful of noteworthy changes,” says Chartier. He notes:
On the feature side of things, Forestle’s search results page has been updated with a new optional thumbnail preview of each page . Installing Forestle’s browser plug-in is now easier and also supports more browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, and even SeaMonkey, a Mozilla-based browser that includes clients for e-mail, IRC, and HTML editing. Forestle can now be added to iGoogle, and the engine has even been certified as CO2-neutral.
It will be interesting to see if Forestle’s interface becomes more Yahoo-like. I would think Yahoo would at least want some kind of acknowledgement, and would prefer Forestle linked to its own maps, news, images, etc.
