Jan. 3--DURHAM -- Was giving more to charity one of the resolutions you made for 2009? If so, JJ Ramberg has a Web site tailor-made for that purpose.

Los Angeles-based GoodSearch.com uses the Yahoo! search engine and donates half of its advertising revenue to nonprofit organizations designated by searchers.

"People have big hearts, and everyone cares about something, but [they] don't often have big wallets and don't often have a lot of time to spend helping these causes," said Ramberg, who has an undergraduate degree from Duke and an M.B.A. from Stanford.

"And so we wanted to help the causes and help people help their favorite causes," she continued. "And when we saw how much money search engines were making or generating from advertising, which was billions and billions of dollars, we thought, 'Wow, what if we could redirect some of that money to these nonprofits and schools?' "

Ramberg, 38, works in New York as the host of the weekly "Your Business" show, which airs on MSNBC Sunday mornings at 7:30. She's also been a reporter for CNN and NBC News and spent time volunteering both domestically and overseas, where she has served microfinance organizations in Uganda and India.

This is not the Ramberg family's first Internet venture. GoodSearch co-founder Ken Ramberg, JJ's 43-year-old brother, was also a founder of the JobTRAK career service for college and university students that went online and is now owned by monster.com. JJ Ramberg used to be marketing director for Cooking.com.

Contracts prohibit the for-profit GoodSearch from divulging the total amount of money it gives away, JJ Ramberg said. But in three years the venture has donated more than $22,000 to the ASPCA and more than $10,000 to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, according to figures provided online and by JJ Ramberg.

Those amounts include donations enabled by online shoppers at a companion site, GoodShop.com, which was launched in 2007. It features more than 700 online stores, including Apple, Home Depot, Macy's, Ralph Lauren, Wal-Mart and Williams-Sonoma, and offers hundreds of coupons to shoppers.

As of Thursday afternoon, GoodSearch.com and GoodShop.com served 73,067 charities. Some 700 organizations apply to the site each week.

"We hear from nonprofit organizations every single day here," JJ Ramberg said. "We talk to them on the phone, we get e-mails from them saying that donations are down because of the economy. And so here's a very easy way to help these organizations that are really trying to do so much good without breaking your own bank."

The sites, which employ about a dozen people, also work without triggering an avalanche of direct mail solicitations. Neither one requires personal or credit card information.

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