In response, Foretle said, "Well, we don’t agree with that! We displayed a note at the top of the Forestle result page that says, ‘only click on Google sponsored links if you are really interested in them.’ Also we saved 0.1 m² per search and not per click! So where did we offer incentives to click on ads?"

Either way, their partnership with Google ended in September after just Forestle just launched out of beta in August. David Chartier at Ars Technica reports now however, that Forestle has formed a partnership with Yahoo, and it’s back and more transparent than ever.

The site still has a Googlish look and feel to it, and in fact even still links to Google for image search, maps, videos (YouTube), and News. Really, there is no evidence on the Forestle front page that the site has anything to do with Yahoo whatsoever.

"Regardless, Google apparently never had a change of heart, so Forestle forged a two-year partnership with Yahoo and is back with a handful of noteworthy changes," says Chartier. He notes:

On the feature side of things, Forestle’s search results page has been updated with a new optional thumbnail preview of each page . Installing Forestle’s browser plug-in is now easier and also supports more browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, and even SeaMonkey, a Mozilla-based browser that includes clients for e-mail, IRC, and HTML editing. Forestle can now be added to iGoogle, and the engine has even been certified as CO2-neutral.

It will be interesting to see if Forestle’s interface becomes more Yahoo-like. I would think Yahoo would at least want some kind of acknowledgement, and would prefer Forestle linked to its own maps, news, images, etc.

Their methods of going about this, however, have gotten the site’s search functionality revoked by Google. When you try to perform a search on Forestle, you get a big pink box with a message from the Forestle team. The message goes:

We just received an email from Google in which they announced the end of the partnership with Forestle. They said that we offered "incentives to click artificially on sponsored links" and that this was not compliant with their policies.

We displayed a note at the top of the Forestle result page that says, "only click on Google sponsored links if you are really interested in them." Also we saved 0.1 m² per search and not per click! So where did we offer incentives to click on ads?

Philipp Lenssen at Blogoscoped notes that Forestle’s explanation page says, "Forestle earns advertising revenue from clicks on ’sponsored link." Lenssen also got a comment out of Google who referred to their program policies page and said:

“Forestle was in violation of our terms of service. When we are made aware of a potential policy violation, our team of specialists will manually review the site to make sure it abides by our program policies. In this case we have stopped serving ads to Forestle.”

Forestle is encouraging users to try the search engine at Znout.com (also based on Google Custom Search) as an alternative until they resolve the situation with Google. I have to assume that Znout’s policies are in line with Google’s.