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I feel sick to my stomach when I see a multi-billion giant like Microsoft using “children refugees” as a cover up to market their latest web 2.0 businesses called live.com!

While doing my search for my previous story, I came across a press release by UNHCR which said: “Microsoft launches “Click for Cause” initiative to support UNHCR web campaign“.

UN Refugee Agency led campaign to raise awareness and funds for education and sport programs for refugee youth. The campaign website can be found at Ninemillion.org.

The merciful Micro$oft decided to support the campaign under one condition; you have to use their new web 2.0 search engine/start page enable that they generate few more billions to give some peanut to UN refugee campaign.

Under the initiative, every Internet search performed at http://click4thecause.live.com using Microsoft’s Live Search facility will result in a financial donation to ninemillion.org. The donation programme will be coupled with a broad online awareness campaign for ninemillion.org to include advertising and editorial space on Microsoft online properties, such as MSN and microsoft.com, in 26 markets around the world.

Microsoft has agreed to host the search site until the end of March and to promote it by creating a downloadable “gadget,” developing online advertising to appear on the MSN portal websites in certain countries and purchase advertising inventory from the MSN/Live network.

The company will guarantee a minimum donation of US$100,000 to UNHCR based on the number of queries that are generated from the search site. The rate for each query will be US$0.01. The maximum donation payable by Microsoft will be US$250,000, which would be equivalent to 25 million search queries.

Cheap, very cheap!!

Although I don’t personally recommend live.com as a search engine, however, I’ll use it for a while for the sake of supporting the refugee youth around the world.