14 DAY TRIAL // Google is trying to give something back to the community. And what better way to do that than to offer something it's best at, namely search. The company has launched a community service aggretator site, called All for Good, to help those looking for volunteer work. The service will gather information from a variety of charities and other organizations or sites and let users search for the best opportunity for them.
“While many organizations are doing great work to enable community service locally, it's not simple to search across opportunities from a variety of places to find what's right for you. We have some experience finding relevant information from among many scattered sources, and when we learned that President Obama and the First Lady were making community service a top priority even before taking office, we thought we could help make a difference,” Google Engineers Paul Rademacher and Adam Sah said in the blog post announcing the site.
The service was put together by a number of Google employees working on their “20 percent” projects, but enlists the help of some other companies too, like the Craigslist Foundation, YouTube, FanFeedr and UCLA. And, in keeping with the philanthropic theme, Google has also released a set of APIs, so that other sites can search the same data and, in fact, the recently launched government site Serve.gov already uses All for Good for its search backend.
The search interface is simple and intuitive, allowing users to choose what type of volunteer work they would like to do and also the area where they would be interested to go. After those simple criteria are chosen, the site returns a list of opportunities in the user's area, which can then be filtered by date.