Why We Built SearchScene

The injustice of it all

The threats of climate change (caused largely by industrialised nations) are disproportionately affecting poorer nations, where living conditions are already harsh to begin with. The irony here is that the people least responsible for causing it, are bearing the brunt of it. Meanwhile, the governments of most developed nations are doing little to solve the climate crisis, saying one thing whilst doing the opposite and doing little more than paying lip-service to the crisis that faces us all.

Whilst poorer nations suffer, big tech companies, like Google, Facebook, Amazon and so on, are making billions of dollars in profits from mining your data, whilst avoiding paying their fair share of taxes and giving relatively little away to charity. They hoard their profits at our expense and their owners become billionaires, whilst in third-world countries, people born into extreme poverty have to walk miles every day just to get dirty water. These people have virtually no hope of making their lives any better without external help. This social injustice appalls us and we wanted to try to do something about it.

But why a search engine?

A search engine is something that virtually everyone uses, whether it be on their phones, tablets or desktop computers. Raising money via a search engine empowers everyone to be part of the movement to raise money to fight climate change and alleviate the suffering it causes. The method is unique in that you don’t have to donate any of your time or money – you just do what you do anyway, search the web! But do it using SearchScene!

Google currently controls over 90% of the search engine market, so they can get away with pretty much anything. Google makes billions of dollars in profits from selling you advertising. Meanwhile, they avoid paying their fair share of taxes, they donate relatively little to charity and they track you all over the web, tying your searches together to form a profile of you, just so that they can sell you even more advertising. And they do this shamelessly. Why aren’t people more angry about this?

The internet belongs to all of us, so why is it that one company holds all the keys, controlling almost everything you see and do online and shamelessly spying on you while you do it?

We wondered, what if nearly all of the money that Google made were put to work solving the climate crisis, feeding the hungry, saving habitats and wildlife, and easing the social injustice in the world by lifting people out of extreme poverty? How much good could that do? Turns out, it could do a lot!

Google are rich and powerful because we’ve made them so. But this can change. We can choose to use a more ethical search engine instead.

Ethical alternatives to Google do exist. Alternatives like Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees. Alternatives like DuckDuckGo, which claims not to track you. And we wondered why more people weren’t using them. The answer lies in the fact that you have to make a considerable sacrifice in your search experience whilst using these ethical search engines. The search results are just not in the same league as Google’s. We thought we could do better. And so, SearchScene was born.

Why climate change charities?

SearchScene is dedicated to helping resolve the burning issue of our time – climate change. We are the first and last generation that can act to prevent the climate catastrophe: the first that fully appreciates its devastating impact; and the last that can make meaningful changes to avoid it. But we must act now.

Our profits from search ads go towards supporting a number of huge international charities that are working in many different ways to fight climate change and the suffering it causes. This entails solving the social injustice in the world at the same time. We donate 95% of our profits from search ads to these charities, keeping just enough to allow us to remain as a stable, profitable business in the long-term.

We respect your privacy

Unlike Google, we don’t track you across the web. We don’t save your searches. We don’t save your IP address or any of your personal data. We even go so far as to automatically delete our web host’s server logs every day! And we’ve partnered with Bing, and use many other data sources, to give you great, up-to-the-minute search results, with a Google-like search experience.

Our privacy policy is rock-solid – check it out here!

If you build it, they will come!

We’ve built the search engine. We hope you will now help us spread the word. Together, we can really make a difference!