Q. How is Yahoo! marketing search against the Google search engine?

A. One individual and one charity at a time.

Imagine trying to compete with Google! It makes me sigh every time I think about trying to go up against that Goliath!

One way Yahoo! is competing is by encouraging people to give to their charity of choice by using GoodSearch.com. With every search conducted on the Yahoo!-powered GoodSearch.com, approximately one penny is donated to an individual’s favorite charity.

It was started 6 years ago by Ken Ramberg (the former founder of JOBTRAK, now a division of Monster.com) and JJ Ramberg (an MSNBC anchor and the former Director of Marketing at Cooking.com.) After realizing what a fraction of the $8 billion generated annually by search engine advertisers could do if it were directed towards organizations trying to make the world a better place, they launched GoodSearch in 2005.

I believe that they have developed a strong social media sharing page as a tool for making it relatively easy for an individual to market the search.

Notice how it is organized with text links and anchor links, along with snippets of code for people to pop into their Facebook, Twitter or Blog. I like how the individual can measure what the search donations are to their specific charity.

You may want to look at their “Spread the Word” page if you’re trying to get people to spread the word about your organization by providing tools like widgets, codes and toolbar information that individuals can use to share on their pages.

And if you’re a marketing professional in fund raising and development, trying to stretch your marketing budget, you might want to consider using Good Search for your organization.

If you’ve had experience with Good Search, please leave a comment below. I’d like to hear your thoughts.