Google: You're Not Saving the Rain Forests That Way!

Forestle is a search engine built on Google Custom Search, with the goal of saving the Rain Forests. That seems like a noble enough cause.

Their methods of going about this, however, have gotten the site's search functionality revoked by Google. When you try to perform a search on Forestle, you get a big pink box with a message from the Forestle team. The message goes:

We just received an email from Google in which they announced the end of the partnership with Forestle. They said that we offered "incentives to click artificially on sponsored links" and that this was not compliant with their policies.

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?

Philipp Lenssen at Znout.com (also based on Google Custom Search) as an alternative until they resolve the situation with Google. I have to assume that Znout's policies are in line with Google's.

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