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Forestle, a German search engine that uses Google Custom Search program and was launched last month has observed lack of co-operation from Google. The later has accused the German search engine for offering incentives to users for an artificially click on the sponsored links. On the other hand Forestle has denied the charges.

Forestle is available in various languages and for various countries. The homepage of the website reads the following text:

Save 0.1 yd² of rainforest with each search you do at Forestle. So far we have already saved 31,997.4 yd² of rainforest!

Now if you search anything, you will get no result, instead you will be greeted with a message from Forestle saying “Google ended partnership with Forestle!”. Below that message you will see the forbidden message from Google.

This is what the note from Forestle says when you search anything:

Dear Forestle user,

We just received an email from Google in which they announced the end of the partnership with Forestle. They said that we offered “incentives to click artificially on sponsored links” and that this was not compliant with their policies..

Well, we don’t agree with that!

We displayed a note at the top of the Forestle result page that says “only click on Google sponsored links if you are really interested in them”. Also we saved 0.1 m² per search and not per click! So where did we offer incentives to click on ads?

In our opinion Google ended the partnership, because Forestle became too successful: Yesterday we earned almost 200 USD and saved more than 4,000 square meters of rainforest!

Just below this they are motivating users to use their other eco-friendly search engine Znout which is also powered by Google. According to Forestle, all the revenue generated by it, excluding the administrative charges, goes to ‘The Nature Conservancy’ initiative.

Google has also commented on the issue. According to the search engine giant:

Forestle was in violation of our terms of service. When we are made aware of a potential policy violation, our team of specialists will manually review the site to make sure it abides by our program policies. In this case we have stopped serving ads to Forestle.