A war of words has broken out between an Australian "eco-friendly" search engine and Google.

Ecocho.com.au was launched last week claiming to be the world's first carbon-neutral search engine. The Web site receives funds from searches funnelled through Yahoo, and Google's Adsense program.

It then promises to use those funds to buy carbon offset credits, claiming 1,000 searches made through the Web site would result in the planting of two trees.

However, the Web site aroused the attention of Google, after Ecocho began a campaign to solicit searches, resulting in Google ordering the removal of Adsense from the site.

"In this case the site was in clear violation of our terms of service and we had previously warned the owner of past violations ... We have now stopped serving ads and search results to the owner's sites," a Google Australia spokesperson said.

According to Google's Adsense program policies, participants "may not encourage users to click the Google ads by using phrases such as click the ads, support us, visit these links, or other similar language" or "promise compensation to a third party for such behaviour".

The move has sparked an angry response from Ecocho founder, Tim Macdonald.

"We met with Google on several occasions before we started to build Ecocho, and they seemed very positive about the idea and even pointed out similar sites. They had months to raise concerns but we heard nothing until today.

"Now Google have said we've breached their Adsense agreement. We've tried calling Google to fix the issue together but we're yet to hear from them," said Macdonald.

Google denies the company agreed to Ecocho's initial request to be a partner with the Web site. It said the site's Adsense service was automatically approved, but later withdrawn after a "manual review".

The Google spokesman added that the company that owns Ecocho, advertising company Found Agency, have previously been warned of multiple Adsense policy violations.