There are days when you procrastinate, frying your brain cells reading all kinds of pointless stuff on the Net to the point that you teeter on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Days when—between stories about vomiting volcanoes, pedophile priests, and quivering quakes, the insignificance of your day-to-day hits you like a ton of bricks. Wham! A reality check that hits so hard, it shatters your fragile little ego!

And since, like the Europeans, we spend more time surfing the Web than making love—which goes to show how cyber-dependent we’ve become—there are actually Band-Aid solutions that can fill the temporary void and lend a hand to those in need at the same time. And not only does this solution require minimal effort, but we don’t even have to tear our eyes away from our beloved screens! Let’s give it up for humanitarian search engines! Hip hip, hooray!

There most certainly are paid alternatives to Google out there. Search engines that net a profit, and not only for some multinational corporation, but for the needy or just for our good old planet! Take Doona for example. This humanitarian search engine gives all its advertising proceeds to a number of organizations. Of course, the size of the donation depends on the number of clicks and volume of traffic garnered by the search engine. The beauty of it all is that it doesn’t cost the user a thing—not time, nor money!

For light green (or darker hued) environmentalists, there’s Ethicle, a search engine that pledges to plant one tree for every 100 searches. To this day, 13,981 trees have been planted. That’s a whole forest!

Nowadays, the road to the library is becoming the one less traveled and we hardly ever open a book or an encyclopedia to find information or fuel our minds. We just have to log on and bam! the information is at our fingertips. Making a difference, giving a little back, is the same idea—it’s just a question of typing in the right URL.