Progressive Wednesday

GoodSearch.com

Editor’s Note: As you might have noticed, one of our right-hand sidebars includes a banner for GoodSearch.com. This post is giving you skinny on why we’ve got it plopped there so prominently.

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Okay, years ago, we wrote about ways to conduct search online quickly and accurately by using free, 24/7 online chat with real reference librarians. (Click here to read all about it.) That said, there are times when you need to find out what your ex is up to, or find a time-wasting website or blog, or find things potentially unmentionable to your publicly PG librarians. You’re gonna need a search engine.

Allow me to kindly recommend GoodSearch.com. This sucker seems too good to be true, but it ain’t. GoodSearch is a search engine, powered by Yahoo!, that donates 50% “of its revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users.” So the results you get for your search are good (since a legit engine is powering GoodSearch), and the money is raised solely from advertising, neither the users of GoodSearch nor the charities listed pay anything. Remember: you get to choose the charity or organization of your choice. If you have any questions, here are the FAQs.

Not convinced? You can read what the company has to say for itself here, and for its founders here, and for some of the bigwigs lending them a hand here.

Still not convinced its legit, buckaroo? Check out this New York Times article here, and a CNN piece on the engine here, and a feature on this nonprofit in Entrepreneur Magazine here.

To make life that much easier, you can download a toolbar for IE or Firefox right over here. We’d like to recommend passing the word along: just click here. Consider it your progressivism for the day. And here’s a way to add a link to Good Search to the bottom of your emails. The more folks who know about this, we think, the better.

We can’t think of an easier way to raise cashola for the charity of your choice.

How to Search Progressively, Part III

Editor’s note: A few weeks ago we started our four-part series on how to search the Internet more progressively. And yes, there are four better ways to search the Internet than just relying on Google, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo, or Ask.com. Click this sentence to read what we wrote the first week about the problems with searching the WWW, and ways you can chat with librarians online. Click this sentence to read Part II, where we discussed GoodSearch.com.

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Scroogle.org

Okay, there's oodles of controversy about Google and their cookies and plenty of their et cetera, and there's about a tenth of the controversy about Scroogle, a Google scraper, which essentially allows you to search using that mother of all search engines without the heebie-jeebies of cookies, search term records, or access logs. Plus, it functions sans ads.

To be honest, we don't really feel like getting into the controversy. The way we figure it, if you want to use Google and are concerned about the stuff that concerns people, but you still want the power of their engine, use the scraper.

Click this sentence for the Google scraper.

If you'd like to read more about Scroogle, we'd go here and here and here. To read the opposite side of the argument, go here.

If you want a Firefox toolbar for Scroogle, which we use when we're not using GoodSearch.com, you can go here or here or here. Take your pick (for the record, we use the Mycroft add-on).

Let’s say GoodSearch.com doesn’t help you find what you’re after, here's our argument in favor of Scroogle over Google:

1. If there's any potential problem with privacy, and there's a way to avoid it, why wouldn't you?
2. If you can avoid Google's off-topic ads when you do a search, why wouldn't you?

Google, like television, isn't a free service as some might have us believe: we pay for it with our time, and our mind, in the form of advertisements. So Scroogle until your heart's content.

The Grandeur of Earth Day

Problem:

Earth Day is April 22, and recognizing and reacting to this day couldn't be more important. Why? Because the planet, as we know it, is dying, its heart is slowly stopping, and we needn't look farther than a mirror to see who's to blame.

But we're powerful. We're creative and resourceful and brilliant: lest we forget, we landed on the moon, we invent and reinvent language, we split the atom, we adopt forgotten children as our own. Most importantly, we are, at our core, good. And like metaphoric doctors with a metaphoric defibrillator, it's shocking how quickly we can bring the planet back to life.

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Make Progress:

Eventually, the bugs — blasted things that they are — are going to take over the planet. Our species is going to cease being. At Progressive Wednesday, we'd like to put that headstone for humanity off for as long as possible.

Much like our bodies, which regulate themselves to maintain homeostasis, the planet is one giant organism. Rain, bees, and rabbits help plants grow and reproduce. The plants help oxygenate the air, reduce greenhouse gases, and help protect glaciers and icecaps, the largest reservoirs of freshwater on the planet. Rivers thrive, so the fish thrive, so the bears thrive. Right now in a city near you, cats are killing rats. And the rats– ¦ well, we've got no idea what they do except keep alleys company. Let's just say that the interconnectivity of all species of life is a bit mind-boggling and that biodiversity lies at the core of this connectivity. We think it's safe to say humans don't even completely understand its importance.

To liberally quote the 19th Century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

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[But] all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

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And for all this, nature is never spent.

Nature is never spent. There's hope, my peeps. And because at our best we're stewards of the environment, it's time to right this ship of ours a bit. That's how we celebrate Earth Day around these here parts. That's how we celebrate our planet's unfathomable grandeur: we protect it.

• Earth
• Animals
• Air
• Water
• Plants

The Grandeur of Earth Day: Animals

Animals:

Okay, my pretties. This one is easy as making macaroni and cheese. (Mmm– ¦ mac and cheese– ¦.)

But first, let me say this: in my lifetime, 15 species of animals have gone extinct.

According to the World Conservation Union, another 15,589 are at risk of extinction. But are we to blame? Chew on this one: “[over the] past 400 years [we] have seen 89 mammalian extinctions, almost 45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammal species are listed as critically endangered.– I believe that falls under the category of “Yes.–

So, on Tuesday, we told you about Good Search, the search engine fully powered by Yahoo, which donates half of the profits from ad revenue to the charity of your choice. So, this week, we're asking that you only use Good Search to crawl the web, and select the WWF (the World Wildlife Foundation) as the charity. If nothing else, there's this to love about the WWF — they forced the World Wrestling Federation to change their name to the WWE! What's not to love?

But you want the skinny? It goes like this: the 45-year-old, non-political, global, independent, and multicultural World Wildlife Foundation strives to conserve and protect the planet's biodiversity, promote cutting our oodles of pollution, and make sure that we use our natural resources in a sustainable fashion. How? Well, they “are currently funding around 2,000 conservation projects and employ almost 4,000 people across the planet.– And they work closely with the locals in every area where a project is focused.

Their main goal is lofty and lovely: “To stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.–

Harmony you say? Well, if you promise to use Good Search to raise some cabbage to help the WWF protect our animals — pandas to pachyderms — we'll let you listen to two lovely tunes sung and strummed by lovely folks. (Okay, we'll let you anyway, but use Good Search. Cool? Cool.)

“Train From Kansas City” by Neko Case http://media.anti.com/neko_case/the_tigers_have_spoken/Train_From_Kansas_City.mp3

“The Dark Don't Hide It” by Magnolia Electric Co. http://www.scjag.com/mp3/sc/darkdonthideit.mp3

How to Search Progressive, Part II

Editor’s note: One week ago today, we started our four-part series on how to search the Internet progressively. And yes, there are four better ways to search the Internet than just relying on Google, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo, or Ask.com. Click this sentence to read what we wrote last week about the problems with searching the WWW, and the first suggestion we made.

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GoodSearch.com

Okay, all that talk from last week about librarians aside, there are times when you need to find out what your ex is up to, or find a time-wasting website or blog, or find things potentially unmentionable to your publicly PG librarians. You're gonna need a search engine.

Allow us to kindly recommend GoodSearch.com. This sucker seems too good to be true, but it ain't. GoodSearch is a search engine, powered by Yahoo, that donates 50% “of its revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users.” So the results you get for your search are good (since a legit engine is powering GoodSearch), and the money is raised solely from advertising, neither the users of GoodSearch nor the charities listed pay anything. Remember: you get to choose the charity or organization of your choice. If you have any questions, here are the FAQs.

Not convinced? You can read what the company has to say for itself here, and for its founders here, and for some of the bigwigs lending them a hand here.

Still not convinced its legit, buckaroo? Check out this New York Times article here, and a CNN piece on the engine here, and a feature on this nonprofit in Entrepreneur Magazine here.

To make life that much easier, you can download a toolbar for IE, Firefox, and Safari right over here. We'd like to recommend passing the word along: just click here. Consider it your progressivism for the day. And here's a way to add a link to Good Search to the bottom of your emails. The more folks who know about this, we think, the better.

We can’t think of an easier way to raise cashola for the charity of your choice.