Searching for a Cause

Imagine a company that uses technology to help power more than 20,000 nonprofits, charities, religious organizations and schools. That's the premise of GoodSearch, a Yahoo!-powered search engine that donates about 50 percent of gross revenue received from online advertisers to nonprofits nationwide. Just by searching the net via www.goodsearch.com, users raise money for their preselected organization. "Search engines generated $6 billion in revenue last year, and that's the revenue that we share with the nonprofits," says Ken Ramberg, 41, who launched the Los Angeles company last November with his sister, JJ, 35.

Blogs and message boards are abuzz with talk of GoodSearch, which makes it possible to view, in real time, the amount of money raised for individual organizations. Says Ramberg, "GoodSearch is really the perfect conversion of [using] technology to effortlessly help a wide variety of causes."

This article was originally published in the November 2006 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Searching for a Cause.