The Hall County Animal Shelter now has a way for people to donate money without ever spending a penny of their own.

The shelter is now signed up with GoodSearch, a search engine that donates a small amount of money with every search.

It works just like other major search engines, like Google, said Shannon Hunt, program coordinator with the Hall County Animal Shelter.

“It’s a Yahoo search engine, so it’s a really good search engine that they may possibly be using anyway,” Hunt said.

“It does just as good a job as searching anywhere else.”

GoodSearch donates 50 percent of revenue from advertising to participating organizations, which include charities, churches and environmental groups.

“For GoodSearch, you have to be a charity. We are a 501(c)3, so I just submitted our name and we were accepted,” Hunt said.

Each search is worth about 1 cent. Users just enter the name of the organization they would like to support and then search. People can support multiple charities through the site, but only one organization can be selected per search.

According to GoodSearch, if just 1,000 supporters search twice a day on average, an organization could make $7,300 per year.

With 10,000 people searching for the shelter, the earning potential would increase to $73,000.

“If we get people in the habit, people are running Web searches all the time anyway,” Hunt said. “You’re just making money for the shelter as you go along and it really adds up very quickly if you get enough people in the community doing it.”

A few other organizations in Northeast Georgia, such as the Appalachian Trail Servants of Gainesville and Arbor Pointe Church in Jefferson, are using GoodSearch, too.

Hunt said the shelter hopes to raise money to support a number of activities throughout the year.

“It will go into general funds for all sorts of different needs. We have so many different projects going right now that we need the funds for,” Hunt said. “We’re very excited about it.”