Want to donate money to the pro-life cause, but the budget is too tight this month to even think about it? Just use ProLifeSearch.com to do your next content search on the Internet. You’ll be putting money in the savings accounts of groups like Priests for Life, Human Life International and other pro-life groups, large and small.

No catches. It’s that simple.

The site made its debut in October as the brainchild of Jack Manhire and Joe Hanley, both of the Chicago area. They’re lawyers who work and often attend Mass together.

Manhire explains what prompted the idea for their site.

“We came across the news that Google was going to create a new charity starting with almost a billion dollars,” he says, “most of it coming from their search engine.” He’s quick to add that Google took in $3.4 billion in last year.

The men were also prompted by the big bucks that people like Bill Gates give through their multi-million dollar charitable arm.

But Hanley realized the glitch in high-level giving.

“Besides Mr. [Tom] Monaghan, there just aren’t many deep-pocket businesses that are supporting causes you and I believe in,” he says.

Manhire chimes in: “We thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could use Internet technology, as these guys have, but to help the pro-life cause?” 

“People can use something they already use every day and that simple act of searching would be creating revenues we could donate to pro-life causes,” adds Manhire. “And it’s not money coming out of the users’ own pockets.”

Both founders developed ProLifeSearch with their own money and worked out a relationship with Google. Searches over the new engine are actually performed by technology resting on Google’s giant and powerful search-engine platform. Type in “Eucharistic adoration,” for example, and the engine will scan millions of Web pages in a matter of seconds in order to serve up links to the pages that have that term somewhere in their text.

Better yet, says Manhire, ProLifeSearch is equipped with the SafeSearch filter.  This excludes search results with porn and other objectionable material.

“When you go into ProLifeSearch.com,” he emphasizes, “you get the same Google results without the bad stuff.”

Easy and Effective

The first stage of the site was launched on Oct. 7, Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. By mid-December, more than $8,000 had already been made and donated to handpicked pro-life causes. Users can see the total dollar amount posted on the site and watch the figure grow regularly.

“It’s a great way to use the technology of the Internet to save babies,” notes Father John Blum at St. Frances Cabrini Parish in Springhill, Fla. “And it’s an easy and effective way to support the culture of life.”

The priest started using ProLifeSearch after hearing about it through his family. Now he’s spreading the message and encouraging everyone from his parish’s youth director to parishioners to use it. He points out that, with so much evil a person can get into on the Internet, this site is “like a ray of light.”

It’s a great way for the youth of the parish, so tied into the Internet and computers, to play a part in supporting the culture of life,” adds Father Blum.

It works this way. Along with any search results, a group of sponsored links is right with them on that first page. These links are from advertisers paying to be ranked among the top “hits” for any given keyword. When someone checks out a sponsored link, the link pays Google.

Google provides the sponsored links to ProLifeSearch, then splits the revenue monthly — a bit over 50%, according to Manhire — if a user clicks on that sponsored link.

The potential is enormous for pro-life causes because Google’s own revenues are, as Manhire noted, in the billions.         

“Even if we can only tap into a fraction of that, it will make a difference,” says Manhire. “I’d love to write $25,000 checks to the pro-life organizations over and over again.”

He and Hanley earn no money from the site.

Finding Funds 

“We can really make a difference in the life of a small to mid-sized [local] charity in addition to supporting the bigger ones,” says Hanley, once a research assistant to Notre Dame Law Professor Emeritus Charles Rice, who’s on ProLifeSearch’s board of advisers. Working in a homeless shelter right out of college, Hanley saw the impact a $5,000 check could make.

“The difference a meaningful gift can have to a young woman in a crisis-pregnancy situation got the wheels turning,” he says. ProLifeSearch has already been helped the women’s shelter at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago. The goal is to add hundreds of smaller charities.

In Owings Mills, Md., teenager Joan Walsh e-mailed Manhire and Hanley to suggest a cause called Stand True, a pro-life ministry geared to teens. She became a regular user of ProLifeSearch as soon as she stumbled upon the site.

“I know a lot of pro-life organizations are struggling financially and I’m excited that we can help them just by searching,” she says. “I search a lot anyway and used to use Google. This is just like Google. It’s powered by Google and it comes up with the exact same results.”

Manhire explains the charities getting onto ProLifeSearch’s list have to actively engage in or promote the culture of life taught by the Church, and they can’t advocate or condone any kind of violence.

Already he and Hanley are looking at ways to expand the site’s potential, maybe even into pro-life shopping.

“The ultimate vision is to make a pro-life Internet community that allows people to do on the Web what they’re going to do normally,” says Manhire. “And, when they do, they’ll be supporting life.

“The tool itself doesn’t make any money,” says Manhire. “It’s only a committed group using this that will create the revenue.”

Ladies and gentlemen, rev up your search engines and help the pro-life cause.

Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.