Isara

Isara is a non-profit search engine and charity organization founded in 2005. It is currently located in northeastern Thailand.

History
Isara first came to exist when Patrick Kirk Gillock (PK), after two years of volunteering in schools and colleges, decided to open a Learning Center where children and adults would be educated for free. During that time, Isara began with a helmet campaign when Gillock found himself visiting hospitalized students who suffered preventable injuries from motorcycle accidents. Gillock felt that serious injuries could be avoided if local citizens were educated about the importance of motorcycle safety and were also provided free helmets. Isara's outreach continued to grow as additional needs were recognized, such as providing school supplies to orphans, aid to Burmese refugees, and building classrooms.
The Isara web site was first created by Gillock in November 2005, as a way to fund projects with ad revenue instead of simply begging people for money. It slowly started to catch on and by early 2006 Isara was able to create projects that were paid for only by the site's ad revenue instead of donations.

Concept

Isara.org is based on the same concept as eg. Google. Websites such as search engines typically make money by selling advertising or being sponsored by third-party funders. The more visitors a website receives the more money they make. Instead of keeping the money made, Isara.org uses the same concept to fund different charity projects. Since everyone at Isara is a volunteer, 100% of sponsors' contributions go directly to the charity projects it creates. The projects are updated daily with photos or videos and visitors can choose to give feedback and suggestions in the Isara web forum.

In order to maximize the amount of visitors and hits, they are encouraged to switch their homepage to Isara.org and to use the various search engines, including Isara's own search engine, ACORN, which is currently being built using the Nutch open source platform.

Various projects

In April, 2007, Isara set up the Isara Learning Center, a free school in rural Thailand teaching English as a foreign language and computers to children and adults.

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See Also

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