Green Maven: Green Maven is a search engine designed to specifically search the “green web.” They focus on helping you find the best green, conscious, and sustainable web sites. There’s also a Green Maven Firefox plugin to make those searches even easier.

Green Maven

Ecocho: Ecocho is a green search engine, which is essentially just a wrapper over Yahoo search. The site gives its users the opportunity to contribute to the purchase of carbon offsets by performing searches. For every 1000 searches, Ecocho grows two trees. They are not a charity, though – 30% of their revenue goes to running costs.

Ecocho

Blackle: Blackle takes everyone’s favorite search engine, Google, and turns off the lights. By using a black background, Blacke saves energy since monitors require more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen. How much energy is saved? Blackle references a blog post that claims that a black Google would save 750 Megawatt-hours per year.

Blackle

searchgreener: Like Blackle, searchgreener has a black background to use less energy. They also donate all profits to the purchase of carbon offsets.

Searchgreener

Eco-find: Another black-background search engine, Eco-find also uses Google search.

Eco-find

Earthle: Because apparently, we can’t have enough darkened engines, Earthle also conserves energy.

Earthle

EcoSeek: The tagline at EcoSeek is “the search engine for all things green,” but unlike Green Maven, EcoSeek is a product search focused engine. The site helps educate buyers and connect them to eco-friendly products, manufacturers, and retailers.

EcoSeek

Greensie: Another green search engine is Greensie, whose mission is to “organize and deliver the world’s best information about green.” Using the bullets below the search box, you can narrow your search to web, images, news, shopping, articles, videos, jobs, audio, or blogs.

Greensie

Greenona: Greenona is yet another green-focused engine that helps you connect with green resources on the web. Their site features many stats, like a large tag cloud of the past 500 searches and the top 100 clicked results.

Greenona

Green Link Central: Another attempt at a green-focused engine is Green Link Central. This one is the Mahalo of green engines, with every link hand-picked by human editors.

Green Link Central

Green Terrior: Green Terroir is a project of Green Consensus, a nonprofit organization that participates in land trusts and offers several services including carbon neutral web hosting, agribusiness consulting, and technological support for social entrepreneurs and fair-trade cooperatives. 100% of the profits of the web site go to land conservation activities and carbon offsets.

Green Terrior

EcoSeeker: It’s not the best-looking of the green engines, but EcoSeeker is a one-woman effort, which is impressive. The site, made by Susan Landes of California, is a directory that helps you find green products, services, and info.

EcoSeeker

Friends Green: Friends Green is a simple search engine wrapper, with Yahoo search as the back-end. Proceeds from searches go towards fighting global warming by funding various reforestation projects. The site also tracks the amount of rainforest they’ve saved at the bottom of the main page via a constantly updating ticker (3,882,253 sq ft as of now).

Friends Green

greenlinking: Greenlinking.com is a search engine wrapper that lets you search using Google alone or by using the results from Yahoo, ninemsn, and Google combined. The site purchases carbon credits via Carbon Planet with the revenue they earn, which averages to an offset of 20 kg of greenhouse gases per user per month.

Greenlinking

ClimateGift: More than just a search engine, ClimateGift is an engine and portal for green content. When you first visit the site, you pick an organization to support before being redirected to the homepage. From then on, your chosen organization receives the money from your ad clicks. The site also functions very well as a personalized homepage, very much like iGoogle, with the ability to add tabs and content.

ClimateGift

Bonus: Google.co.uk users can add a Carbon Footprint tab to their personalized iGoogle homepage thanks to the UK Carbon Footprint Project. (Hey, where’s ours?)

By www.readwriteweb.com

Google is a search engine, an advertising company and now a cellphone maker. But a green energy company? That too, said Bill Weihl, Google’s so-called green energy czar, in an interview with Jeffrey Marlow of The Times on the Green Inc. blog. He said:

Some people might look at that and say, ‘I don’t see any relationship between that and Google’s business.’ And then maybe five years later they’ll say, ‘Whoa, it’s a good thing you guys thought about that.’

Google is interested in making renewable energy less expensive than coal in part because Google, with its massive servers, uses so much energy itself, and because the founders and many of the employees simply care about environmental issues, Mr. Weihl said.

Google has invested $45 million in alternative energy since 2007, including in solar companies eSolar and BrightSource Energy, though the primary goal is not to make money, Mr. Weihl said:

We’d be delighted if some of this stuff actually made money, obviously; it is not our goal to not make money. All else being equal, we’d like to make as much money as we can, but the principal goal is to have a big impact for good.

In the interview, Mr. Weihl also discusses Google’s problem with coal, the technologies it thinks will solve that problem — concentrated solar thermal, enhanced geothermal and high-altitude wind — and what he thinks Google can do to address climate change that other companies can’t. He says:

I believe that the problems we’re facing are solvable, but they’re not going to solve themselves. And solving them is either going to require spending a lot more money on energy than we’re spending today, which I think is probably a non-starter, or it’s going to require major technological innovation. That’s where I think Google can help.

LOS ANGELES, Nov 18 (Reuters Life!) – Concerns over the environment and terrorism have not only affected how people lived in the past decade but also their language, with “global warming” and “9/11″ topping a list of the most used words of the 2000s.

The Global Language Monitor, which uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media, said “Obama” came third in the list with the surname of U.S. President Barack Obama used as the stem for other words.

“Bailout” was listed fourth after the bank bailout was one of the first acts of the financial crisis, “evacuee” came fifth in the wake of Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans, and “derivative” featured fifth.

“Google,” “surge,” “Chinglish” meaning a hybrid of Chinese and English, and “tsunami,” after the 2004 Asian disaster that left 230,000 people dead or missing, followed.

“Looking at the first decade of the 21st century in words is a sober, even somber, event,” said Paul JJ Payack, president of The Global Language Monitor.

“For a decade that began with such joy and hope, the words chosen depict a far more complicated and in many ways, tragic time. Nevertheless, signs of hope and renewal can be found in the overall lists.”

Payack said the top phrase of the decade was “climate change” followed by “financial tsunami” and “Ground Zero.”

Technology’s impact on the past decade was reflected in the list with “Twitter,” the micro-blogging site, one of the most used words while “blog” and “texting” featured on the list.

Hollywood continued to flex its muscle, with “slumdog” from the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” referring to child inhabitants of Mumbai slums, making its mark in global languate. U.S. comedian Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” defined as truth that comes from the gut not books, came in at No. 25.

(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

Google Earth has a new application that shows carbon dioxide in different layers of the earth’s atmosphere. Tyler Erickson, a geospatial researcher at the Michigan Tech Research Institute in Ann Arbor, responded to a competition call from Google asking scientists to present research results using KML, a data format used by Google Earth. This is what he came up with – an app that illustrates for us the carbon cycle, a deeper understanding of which can impact everything from mainstream understanding of carbon emissions to environmental policy.

Erickson said, “I tried to think of a complex data set that would have public relevance.” NASA reports that it lead him to work with data from NASA-funded researcher Anna Michalak of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Michalak develops complex computer models to trace carbon dioxide back in time to where it enters and leaves the atmosphere. With this information, we now have a great visual way to see and understand the carbon cycle, seeing in color where carbon dioxide is cycled into the earth through plants and water or where it hangs in the higher levels of the atmosphere.

To get at this information, a network of 1,000 foot towers with carbon dioxide-measuring equipment Read the full story