Christmas is a time for giving, and not just to friends and family. The spirit of Christmas inspires us to give a little extra, especially to those who need it most.

This is a spirit, of course, that is not limited to the Christian celebration. Let us just say that for us living in the Northern hemisphere the dark and cold of mid-winter is a useful reminder of the need for compassion.

One option is to use a charity search engines. There are plenty of search engines around that use your searches to raise money from advertisers which they donate to charity.

On EveryClick you can do a regular web search or search for charities, fundraisers, images, news or shopping. You can choose which charity you would like to support from over 170,000 UK charities (and you don’t need to be a UK resident).

ClickNow is another UK based search engine and a partner of Ask. Search the entire web, UK web pages or do an image search. You can choose which charity to support from a list of over 200.

MagicTaxi gives 50% of its advertising revenue to charity. Each day they feature a different charity on the homepage. If you prefer you can support just one charity of your choice. You can search Yahoo, Kelkoo or Wikipedia and there’s even a tab for travel search.

GoodSearch is powered by Yahoo and lets you do image search, video search and shopping search as well as regular web search. 50% of all ad revenue generated from the site is donated to the charity of your choice. There’s also a shopping page where you can shop for Christmas gifts. The retailer will donate a a percentage of your sale through an affiliate agreement.

The appropriately named search engine Let Them Know It’s Christmas searches Google and the Google Ads revenue goes to the Christian relief organization World Vision. There is also an option to share slide shows throughFlickr, which also generates ad revenue.

So make a charity search engine your home page this Advent or add a couple to your search bar!