SearchScene Shutdown

Dec 20, 2021

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the closure of SearchScene – The Charitable Search Engine, effective 31 December 2021.

Update, 16 May 2022: Time to say hello to SearchExpander.com, our spin-off project which helps alternative search engines to expand their search results and improve their overall search experience.

How to uninstall SearchScene…

For anyone with our browser extension installed, you can simply remove the extension by doing the following within your browser:

Chrome: type chrome://extensions into your URL bar and hit Enter. Click on the “Remove” button under the SearchScene extension to remove it.
Firefox: type about:addons into your URL bar and hit Enter. Click on the icon with 3-dots next to the SearchScene extension and click on “Remove”.
Edge: type edge://extensions into your URL bar and hit Enter. Click on the “Remove” link under the SearchScene extension.

For users of our iOS or Android mobile app, you can simply delete the app (long-press on the app and then click on “Remove app”) and revert to your old mobile browser, e.g. Chrome, Safari or Firefox. However, we recommend you try some of the apps from other charitable search engines – see our list below.

About SearchScene

We launched SearchScene in March 2020 and had great hopes that it would take-off and become a huge success. We hoped it would empower people all over the world to raise money for charities that fight the causes and effects of climate change and climate injustice, without anyone having to donate any of their time or money in doing so.

There is power in numbers. Since everyone that uses the internet uses a search engine, SearchScene had the potential to raise hundreds of millions of pounds every year for charity.

Like Google, SearchScene made money from search ads (the ads that appear at the top and bottom of your search results). Unlike Google, we donated a minimum of 95% of our profits from these ads to some amazing charities (that you could choose), including:

Eden Reforestation Projects
(who plant trees & help fight climate change)
Oxfam
(who help to fight global poverty)
UNHCR
(who help people displaced by climate change)
UNICEF
(who help support children in danger)
WaterAid
(who help to provide people with clean drinking water)
WWF
(who help to protect wildlife habitats and fight climate change)

SearchScene was mainly powered by Microsoft Bing, whose mainline search results provided us with ads, web results (with embedded images, videos and news), as well as separate image, video and news search results. Bing didn’t provide us with knowledge panels, instant answers or widgets, so we built our own. Our knowledge panels contained data that was pulled from a number of sources, such as Wikipedia, Spotify, IMDb, TMDb, Goodreads and so on. By the time we’d finished with them, our knowledge panels rivalled or were even superior to those of Google for many search queries. We also built instant answers (which were not to be found on any search engine beyond Google and Bing/Yahoo!) and a variety of widgets, such as our BBC-style weather widget.

SearchScene was also extremely private, as we didn’t store your search query, your IP address or any of your user data.

We also allowed you to create public and private groups, allowing you to raise money for charity as a group, such as your business, university, school or department. This was a great way of working together to raise funds for charity.

On top of that, SearchScene gave you a stunning new wallpaper scene every time you reloaded our homepage, hence the name SearchScene. You could also set your own wallpaper image or opt for a blank homepage. And we also offered dark mode, which made all your search results go dark. You can read more here about how SearchScene worked.

Marketing

In marketing SearchScene, we ran targeted ads on Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and LinkedIn. We also employed a digital PR company to help us with direct outreach and engagement on social media, as well as another PR company to help us with getting press exposure in the UK, USA and Canada. On top of that, we contacted 1,600 activist groups in the UK, USA and Canada, contacted every University and Students’ Union in the UK, and we contacted most secondary schools in the UK, along with a number of businesses, to ask them to try SearchScene and try our group impact feature. Meanwhile, our eco-blog grew to over 100 blog posts, some ranking highly in Google, attracting many environmentalists to SearchScene.

Response

Our ads yielded a lot of new users, but conversion rates were low and the cost of advertising meant that we had to pay a very high price for each new user we got. This, coupled with the low revenue from the ads that appeared on SearchScene, meant that advertising on this scale was unsustainable. Meanwhile, our outreach campaign generated very little interest. It seems that most people are just too busy with their own problems and daily tasks to overcome the inertia of switching from Google to a search engine they had never heard of.

That said, there were some who took a chance on us, and we had a fairly high user retention rate and a disproportionately high number of 5-star reviews on all our browser extensions and apps, mainly thanks to the great search experience we provided.

Screenshot from our main Chrome extension, showing our disproportionately high number of 5 star reviews (with a 4.94 star average), given our limited user-base of just 2,000 users on Chrome. 96 of our 101 ratings were 5-stars.

So where did it go wrong?

When we started SearchScene, we hoped that we could make the world a better, more equitable place. We were buoyed by the fact that our search results were second only to Google’s, Bing’s and Yahoo’s. Our advanced knowledge panels, widgets, instant answers, dark mode and privacy-focused features and apps meant that we were technically superior to most other alternative search engines. And by supporting a wide range of charities, we also offered a more holistic approach to helping to alleviate the climate crisis and we gave users a choice in which charities they wanted to support. Sadly, none of that was enough to make SearchScene a success.

It turned out that the level of interest was much lower than we expected, converting people from Google was much harder than we had anticipated, the cost of advertising was incredibly high, the share rate was lower than we had hoped, and the revenue from the ads that appeared on SearchScene was much lower than we thought it would be. Any one of those problems would have been pretty bad on its own, but put them all together and it meant that SearchScene was simply not viable.

We also found ourselves in a catch-22 situation where we couldn’t get much exposure from journalists because they had never heard of us, and they had never heard of us because we hadn’t got much exposure. We simply never managed to get the breakthrough that we needed.

We spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building and marketing SearchScene. To keep our costs low, we had a very small, dedicated team and we never took any remuneration for the countless hours of work that we put in as co-founders. We never made a profit and the combined charitable donations of £42,000 we made mainly came from our company’s savings. This means that, although we committed to donating 95% of our profits to charity, we actually donated way more than 100% of our revenues to charity, making us the most charitable search engine on the planet! This was obviously not sustainable.

Given the lack of progress and the extremely high cost of marketing and promoting the site, we made the call in December 2021 to close SearchScene.

What we achieved…

We committed to donating a minimum of £1,000 (approx $1,320) to each charity per quarter until we became profitable, at which point we would would donate 95% of our profits to each charity (in accordance with everyone’s chosen charities). Since we never became profitable, we donated £7,000 (approx. $9,260) to each of our 6 charities over the 7 quarters that we were operational. This amounted to £42,000 (approx. $55,500) in total.

Our impact metrics for these donations are below…

SearchScene – Final Impact Metrics

What the future holds…

SearchScene never fulfilled its potential in becoming the multi-million pound fundraising powerhouse that we hoped it would be. However, we learnt a great deal about the anatomy of a search engine and what makes it tick. We hope to build on this with some of our future work.

We will now move on to other projects, one of which will involve licensing our knowledge panels, instant answers and widgets to other alternative search engines and websites. Whatever helps other alternative search engines to compete more effectively with Google can only be a good thing for the world!

Update, 16 May 2022: Our exciting new project, SearchExpander.com, has finally taken off!

A big thank you!

We would like to thank everyone that took a chance on SearchScene by installing one of our browser extensions or apps and a big thank you to those who stuck with us. Some users even went further by sharing the site with their friends and promoting it on social media and elsewhere. Thank you all so much!

We would also like to thank our supported charities for their support and interest in our project, and for sharing SearchScene internally and engaging with us on social media.

Finally, we would like to thank our small team of amazing and talented people, who helped make SearchScene the most technically advanced charitable search engine in the world. A big thanks to Joe (our amazing lead developer), Amy (our talented graphics designer), Sophie (our superb blog writer and outreach manager) and Patrice and his team (for our awesome mobile apps). In addition, we would also like to thank Dark Green PR for helping us to get some national press coverage in the UK.

Thank you to everyone else who shared in our vision, helped us, followed us, and used or shared SearchScene along the way.

We are truly sorry that we could not make it work.

Try another charitable search engine instead…

Rather than revert to Google, we would strongly encourage you to check out some of the web’s other charitable search engines instead, such as…

Ecosia (the web’s largest charitable search engine – a non-profit that plants a tree for every 45 searches you make);
OceanHero (a charitable search engine with many great features that collects one ocean-bound plastic bottle for every 5 searches you make);
Youcare (a charitable search engine that lets you choose the charities you want to support);
Lilo.org (a charitable search engine that lets you collect water droplets with your searches, which you can then donate to your chosen charities);
Gexsi.com (a charitable search engine that uses its ad revenue to support a variety of social projects).

Thanks again for trying SearchScene. We are sorry that it didn’t fulfill its potential.

We wish you all the best!

Neil & Ciara
Co-founders
SearchScene.com