Please keep in mind this will raise more funds for our charities, but let us know if you think it will affect the way you use Ripple. We’re very conscious of providing a good search experience, and balancing this with a reasonable level of advertising, so let us know your thoughts in the comments.

And don’t forget – you can add Ripple to your browser!

Boom.

As you may have noticed, we’re having some issues with search at the moment (yes…it’s broken!!!) and it appears some code may have changed in the Google API. Our team of trained monkeys is working frantically to fix the problem.

This has come at a bad time as it is last thing on Friday here and we’re really under the pump. If you can bear with us hopefully search will be back up and running shortly.

Thanks and keep rippling.

UPDATE 15/02/2009: We’ve got some word from a Google employee that they have identified the problem and are working on it. Hopefully this will be resolved quickly. Stay tuned and keep an eye on the blog for more updates.

UPDATE 16/02/2009: All fixed! Thanks for your patience.

ripple search originally ran into trouble as Google felt that directing the co-oop search revenue to charity provided an incentive for people to click on the adsense ads. We disagree of course, but unfortunately we haven’t had a lot of luck getting through to Larry and Sergey to change the official Google policy. Maybe we don’t shop at the same supermarkets……

In all seriousness the folks at Google Sydney have been really helpful. We’ve worked with them over the last two weeks to come up with a solution that fits their TOS but allows people to use ripple search to make a difference.

The solution that we have agreed to with Google generates revenue by a sponsored link underneath the search bar on the main page. We will also be rolling out a new toolbar that generates revenue through a sponsored link in the toolbar over the next week. At that point (sorry) we’ll have to ask everyone to re-install their toolbars to make ripple toolbar searches generate revenue.

The main drawback of our new system is that Google will not let us place a sponsored link on the results page. Therefore repeat searches from the results page do not generate revenue. However, once the toolbar is operational people will be able to make repeat searches from there. We hope that ripplers will find that just as convenient.

We’re all volunteers so things don’t always move as fast as they can but we think we’ve found a clever solution which will let people keep searching with Google and fighting poverty…at the same time. Awesome.

Feedback on the new system is very welcome. Love your work ripplers.

We’ve had quite a lot of feedback about adding more googlish features to the ripple search including search localisation (ie limit my search to USA) and image search.

Rest assured that ripple HQ is hard at work on a solution to these issues, hopefully we’ll have some good news to report soon.