'Tis the season to be jolly fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la. Yes, Christmas, the jolly season, is fast approaching. And what does Christmas spirit means to you?

For me it's giving. This season gifts and donations will overwhelm hearts...and search engines. Time to give. Time to remind other people to share what they got. And you can do it online. Actually, there are a lot of donation-gathering search engines which use searches to help raise fund from advertisers. LetThemKnowItsChristmas.com and ClickNow.org, which offer quick links, are just but a few of them.

Many sites have an "add to searchbar" button or link which allow automatic popping in the list. You can access those sites by clicking on the tiny arrow beside the search engine logo. Everyclick, Magic Taxi and SearchKindly are examples of such sites. GoodSearch went a step further in having a helpful instruction page for adding to Firefox, IE and Safari.

Shiny Shiny gives the details:

In Firefox, you will be asked whether you plan to set this as a default. If you click on without doing so, it's simple to fix this.

1. Click on the arrow mentioned above to see your list of available search engines. You want to have a charity option at the top, so you need to click on "Manage Search Engines".
2. This will bring up the dialog box shown in the screenshot above which will let you select a search engine and bump it up and down the list. Job done, conscience assuaged.

IE 7 is just as straightforward. When you click on the link to add to the search bar, a dialogue box will come up which will allow you to tick a field to make this new addition your default search engine. Then just click on "Add Provider" and you're pretty much done. Again, if you haven't ticked the box:

1. Click on the dropdown arrow and choose "Change Search Defaults".
2. Pick the charity site you want to make your default and press "Set as Default". Ta-dah!

If you are running Vista and you have security turned up to eleven, you might have to first confirm that you wish to install a new search engine, as it's a little oversensitive to anything you might want to add to your computer.