January 10, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Information on nonprofit organizations can be found in some unlikely places. Visitors to Google Finance who enter the name of a national charity, such as the American National Red Cross, can in some cases pull up a page that provides a summary of the organization’s work and links to recent news articles and blog posts about the group.
The Google site also allows visitors to leave comments about charities in a discussion forum.
“This is a game changer,” wrote Sean Stannard-Stockton, who first noted the inclusion of the nonprofit information on his blog, Tactical Philanthropy.
“If these Google pages resided at the top of the search results when people look up nonprofits,” he wrote, “then these pages will become de facto home pages, but with blog posts, new stories and discussions that are both positive and negative.”
The news that nonprofit organizations are included on Google’s business-information Web site prompted speculation that the search-engine company was in the early stages of creating a nonprofit information portal.
But the Mountain View, Calif., company said that the charities have always been in the Google Finance database, and that it has no plans to start a new nonprofit information site.
