DIANA LIU
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008

I FOUND OUT about GoodSearch.com last school year in January, when Julie Dietz, a Uni parent, sent out a schoolwide email encouraging the Uni community to raise money in what had to be the easiest way possible.

I was elated: Each click of a search result meant one cent was donated to the charity or nonprofit organization of my choice.

Supposedly the advertisers were paying, so my conscience was clean. Money could also be generated by going shopping online, through a subprogram known as GoodShop.

Some of my friends and I decided to make the search engine switch. I set GoodSearch as one of my homepages, added a GoodSearch box to my Firefox toolbar, and convinced my then 8-year-old little brother to stop using Mamma.com, "the mother of all search engines."

It worked — for a time.

Around mid-April, the searching frenzy had worn down to a stub. Finals no longer seemed like unwelcome figments of my imagination, and I had less time to make random silly searches like “number of raindrops in a bucket” (consequently, I found this unhelpful applet).

By May, my homepage looked something like this: Google.

Google was simply cleaner and faster and less intrusive. I was also less distracted by its straightforward layout — GoodSearch just had way too many links luring me away from my intended destination.

Feeling slightly guilty, I looked up the total amount raised for Uni from GoodSearch since January. Imagine my un-surprise when I found that the school had followed my same mentality.

The estimated amount of money we’ve earned through our intrepid clicking at the time of this writing totals $188.94. It doesn’t sound too bad, for only clicking, until we look at the optimistic sum of one of Julie Dietz’s potential revenues: "If we have 1,000 people doing 10 searches a day,” she wrote in her e-mail, "in a year’s time we can raise: $36,500."

That number does not seem particularly plausible, even given the rest of September, October, November, and December.

The total aside, it is evident that the school reached its searching peak in March (1,661 searches) and its GoodShop peak in April ($16.94). After that, the trend has been distinctly downhill.

Lethargic progressions of a similar sort appear often in my life. In middle school, I had a goal of memorizing a word a day to increase my pitiful vocabulary. At the time, it didn’t sound very harsh at all. However, by seventh grade I had stopped making an effort. Not that I didn’t care anymore: Upon missing a day, I would try to do two the next. I kept pushing back and procrastinating. The next thing I knew, I hadn’t memorized any words for three months.

FreeRice went much the same way, although I’m glad to report that my interest has been spiked in the last 20 minutes by the addition of new subjects. They now include Famous Paintings, Chemistry Symbols, Grammar, World Capitals, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and the Multiplication Table in addition to the good ol' Vocabulary. For every question I answer correctly, the UN World Food Program donates 20 grains of rice.

There must be something fundamentally wrong with my nature if I somehow manage to neglect these win-win situations. In just this short period of time, I've learned that Montevideo is capital of Uruguay, discovered that J.M.W. Turner is an amazing painter, donated 1,080 grains of rice, and raised 6 cents for Uni High.

GoodSearch has been reinstated as my homepage.

An earlier version of this column was published as an entry on the OG Staff Blog.