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Social Networking - Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Ooga Labs Launched First Site - GoodTree

We have come across Ooga Labs a number of time on our jobs blog Tech:gigger as the startup has been on a hiring binge. Ooga says it plans to launch of number of sites as an incubator of sorts and has 5 stealth mode projects underway.

The first Ooga Labs site is GoodTree, a search engine that donates 50% of its gross revenues to charitable causes. Its a meta search engine run by Infospace that aggregates Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com. It works well enough and is plenty fast. Having outsourced search, the main work done on GoodTree is the back-end charitable donation part.

Ooga was founded by James Courier who was part of the founding team that sold Tickle to Monster.com in 2004 for more than $100M.

Users can set up where they want their search engine dollars to go.

Will it succeed? Why not, it feels good that so far $31K has been donated to charity rather than going to Sergey and Larry. We can also see plenty of other applications developed for charitable given from email to hosting. We could also see GoodTree including accounting so that a large company that encourages its staff to use GoodTree could see how much in donation it did alone.

As it happens, a meta eCommerce site launched today called FindYourCause that also donates a portion of its affiliate revenue to charity.

Read - Social networking meets social change (SFGate)