Frequently asked questions

What is GoodTree.com?

GoodTree is the Web portal that makes a difference in the world everytime you use it. Here you get a personal homepage that can be your control panel for your life online, allowing you to navigate the Web in a way that reflects your beliefs and values. You can join causes, surround yourself with people who care about the same things you do, and share information with them about how to make a difference.

What does GoodTree hope to achieve?

The first goal of the GoodTree team is to build an extremely cool network of millions of people being their best selves, and get them excited and connected to make positive difference in the world. If we can do all that, then we’ll be able to wake up every day and know we're making a difference, and hopefully so will each GoodTree user.

What should I do on GoodTree?

First, get an account.

Second, make a profile.

Third, tell people about GoodTree. It takes just a minute to send an email to, say, 50 people you know. If they send it to 50 people you'll be responsible for making a big difference for a lot of people.

Finally, make it your homepage and use it to do your searching and shopping.

How did GoodTree start?

Getting here has been a long road. We came up with the idea for GoodTree in September 2004, and launched the first version of it in July 2005, when we were part of a bigger Internet company. At the time, it was primarily a search service where a portion of the advertising would be sent to charities of your choice. In November of that year, we had to take the site down because the parent company didn’t think it made sense in their portfolio of companies. In early 2006, we bought the website back from them and by July had put the site live. Then we realized the code base needed to be re-written from scratch, and we decided to do it using MySQL and Ruby on Rails. Then we realized that this was more about people connecting for good than it was about a search engine or a home page. Various beta version of GoodTree have been live since September 2006, and now, finally in 2008, we’re think we’re ready. We have many more features to come, but this is a good start.

What about privacy?

  • We collect email address so we can identify you later and you can retrieve your settings.
  • We place a cookie on your browser you so we can allocate the money generated to your chosen charities.
  • When we help users access their email address books from other sites and send invitations to GoodTree to their friends, we ask for a user’s password, but we never store your password.
  • We store the list of friends you sent emails to through the GoodTree website in order to establish connections between you and your friends on the site.
  • We store all the information, photos, etc. you put into your public profile in the GoodTree People social networking application.
  • We do not connect your personal information with your queries from the search engine part of the site.
  • We only save your queries for 72 hours, and that is only for preventing "search fraud" and we store it in a "hash" format so we can’t tell what your search was for.
  • We do not share email address or other personal information with third parties, including charities.
  • Please refer to our Privacy Policy for more information.

We also have several proven methods for detecting "search fraud" on GoodTree. By our definition, "search fraud" is where someone, eager to give their chosen charities more money, will try to do more searches beyond their "normal use." Those are pretty easy to detect, and we reverse the effects of their fraudulent searches in our database, then block that person from using the GoodTree service.

How Do I make GoodTree my homepage?

If you want to change your homepage to GoodTree you can simply follow the directions here, or more easily, you can visit your GoodTree homepage and click the "Make GoodTree My Homepage" link near the bottom of the page.

I tried to switch my home page to GoodTree, but it didn't work. Why?

Most likely because of the security software on your computer. Many companies and many home computers have useful and necessary software that protect the computers from viruses, spyware, and unscrupulous websites trying to hijack your homepage. As a result, when you actually want to change your homepage, it can be difficult. For instance, only 65% of people who TRY to change their homepage to GoodTree are successful. Because there are so many permutations of security software, browsers and operating systems, we would never be able to describe how to get through making a homepage change in each instance. The best we can do is to encourage you to read these instructions carefully, and if you are at work, ask your system administrator.

If I switched my homepage to GoodTree, and now I've decided I want to change my homepage to something different, how do I switch?

We're grateful you gave GoodTree a try, and we completely understand you may want to change your homepage away from GoodTree at some point. Changing your homepage should take just a few seconds if you follow these directions:

Internet Explorer:
* Under Tools > Internet Options type a new URL into the home page address field. Click OK.

Firefox:
* Under Tools > Options type a new URL into the home page address field. Click OK.

We want to assure you that we do nothing to prevent you from changing your homepage setting to another website. We make a point of saying this because some security software on your computer or security software on your corporate network can make it difficult to change your homepage setting, just as the same software causes 35% of people who try to make GoodTree their homepage fail. We assure you, it is not something GoodTree is doing.

What percent of GoodTree's search revenues are sent to the charities?

12.5%. As a frame of reference, social enterprises like ours typically give less than 10% of revenues to charity. Examples of other social entrepreneurial companies like ours include Newman’s Own (10% of revenues to charity), Ben & Jerry’s (2%), Timberland (2%), Working Assets (2%), the Body Shop (5%). Our competitors -- Yahoo, MSN, and Ask -- pass on 0% of their revenues to charity. Some small websites send 50% or even 100% of their search revenue to charity, but we haven't seen those sites make a really big impact and don't believe they will. We're trying a different model, one where we hope to have enough money to hire more high quality engineers to get GoodTree as good as Yahoo, MSN, iGoogle so we can attract tens of millions of people to get involved, get active, get connected, get informed, and have GoodTree make that big impact we're looking to have. Please join us in this effort.

Where does GoodTree get its Web search results?

GoodTree's metasearch brings you the top results from the Web's best search engines like:

  • Yahoo! Search
  • MSN Search
  • Ask.com

GoodTree has contracted with a public company in Seattle called InfoSpace, Inc. to aggregate the search results from these search technology providers and send them to GoodTree. This is known in the search industry as "metasearch."

How does GoodTree search rank and combine sponsored and non-sponsored Web search results?

The search results you experience on GoodTree blend the top-ranking sponsored and non-sponsored results from each of the search engines based on the specific search term you type. The concentration of sponsored and non-sponsored results you receive is determined by click activity on the results pages for that search term. For example, if the term "cats" receives a higher number of clicks on non-sponsored listings today, tomorrow's results page for "cats" would be more heavily concentrated toward non-sponsored results. This gives GoodTree users significant input into the results they receive. As a result, the precise ratio of sponsored to non-sponsored results for a given search term is variable, but sponsored results are always clearly identified with a "Sponsored by" label.

Some search engines that GoodTree receives results from may allow companies to pay to have their site and related information included in their search index. This is practice is known as paid inclusion. Please note that none of these programs guarantees placement, and that relevancy to your search term remains the focus of their result sets. GoodTree does not monitor or control the search algorithms or methods of our search engine partners, nor do we accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for any of their paid inclusion results. To view the paid inclusion policies for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site.

Where does GoodTree get its Additional Search Content?

Image Search is provided by Yahoo! Search and Ditto.

News Search is provided by Yahoo! Search, Topix, ABC News and Fox News.

Video and Audio search is provided by Yahoo! Search, SingingFish, and Blinkx.

Again, all of these feeds are aggregated for GoodTree under contract with InfoSpace who has contracts with the individual search results provided.