Directly from my brain and onto the internet.
slacktivism at its finest
Published on May 8, 2006 By PJ_ In Medical Technology

Remember Karen's Walk? Sure you do. Well, now you can help us raise money for heart failure research just by searching on GoodSearch. We get a penny for every search. That's a pretty good deal, considering that you were probably doing lots of searches anyway.

(There are other charities to choose from, and you can even set up your own if you have a cause of your own in mind. Poke around on their site for details.)

That's been set up for a while, actually. I'd have linked to it before, but I looked on their tell-a-friend page and didn't see a version of the link that would automatically set the cookie to send money to our cause, and I figured a link in my sidebar wouldn't do much good without that. But I looked deeper on the site and found these searchboxes, which do send you to a page that sets the cookie. They use JavaScript, though. And you have to do a search with them; you can't just click on a link that says "click here to support the Karen Decker Cardiomyopathy Fund." It's annoying because I can see the javascript, I can tell what it's doing, and I know from it that our charity-id is 803084, but I can't make a link to a page that sets that as the default charity because the only page that does that is the search results page. Contrast that with good old TitleTrader.com, which gives you a one pixel image that you can hide on the page where you talk about TitleTrader so even if the user doesn't go there right away, if they type titletrader.com into their web browser a week later they'll still have you as a referrer. That's much more in line with the way advertising actually works. But I digress.

Anyway, do a search with this search box right now, and use GoodSearch as your preferred search engine from now on. You can make it your default search for the FireFox search box, and there's a toolbar for Internet Explorer that you can download (though I haven't tried that myself).

By the way, we raised $3,000 this past weekend. A big thank-you to the RIT Running Club for joining with us this year and bringing in all those competitive running types for the new Karen's Walk/5k Run. It just keeps getting better and better.

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