The Pitch:

Gearch is a Google powered search engine (exactly the same results as Google) that uses all the money generated by the searches to plant trees in Africa. For every search users get tree credits in their account. Once a user has a full tree credit, he can chose where the tree will be planted and Gearch sends money to our tree planting partner in that country to plant the tree.

85% of people care about the environment and global warming, however only 5% of people act differently because of it. The main reasons for this are loss of convenience (e.g stop flying) and not seeing how your small actions can fix a worldwide problem (e.g me changing lamps will not stop global warming).
Gearch is trying to shift the balance and raise money for green initiatives by monetising people's internet searches while overcoming these two classic problems.
Firstly loss of convenience: when using gearch, you get exactly the same search results as when you were using Google as we are powered by Google. In addition we also have a toolbar, image search, maps, etc. to ensure the user does not have to compromise any convenience when using Gearch instead of Google.
Secondly, gearch has a social networking component which encourages citizenship. Users can invite friends and join groups. For example an individual student would save around a tree a month which is drop on a hot plate. However as his class is a group he can see that his class is saving around 30 trees a month, better but still not impressive. However his school saves around 3000 trees a month which already starts to make a difference...
Gearch encourages citizenship as it clearly shows the impact of everybody making a small effort.
Finally gearch is committed to maintain the highest ethical levels to ensure we keep the trust of our community. So we do not store any search results, we have very strict privacy rules and we are completely transparent with our financials.
Gearch is currently live in beta testing (www.gearch.com) with 200 users to refine the user experience and we are in the final phase of signing up our first 15 schools.

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