The story behind SA's greenest search engine begins with an unlikely source: the Yellow Pages.
Charles Ash, founder and CEO of local company GreenSrch.com and related ad network Ads4Trees, had been working on an alternative search model when the knock-on effects of a partner's financial woes took out his company. Armed with a good deal of intellectual property but no real way to compete, he began looking at the granddaddy of search services.
“I looked at the Yellow Pages' business model and in SA they were printing something like four million directories a year,” (official count 5.4 million). “I began thinking about the environmental implications of printing and distributing so many directories and thought, surely, in this day and age where people have cellphones and so on, they shouldn't even be playing in that space.”
He points to the US market's liberalised Yellow Pages service, with any organisation able to use the term as it's not a registered name. In the States, they print more than 500 million Yellow Pages directories per year, resulting in 19 million trees being harvested annually, notes Ash. It also has significant impacts in terms of paper waste (the recycling rate for directories is below 20%), carbon emissions and water consumption. These figures can be found on the YellowPages GoesGreen site, which enables people to opt out of receiving printed copies of the directory.
It is this “massive blight” on the environment that led Ash to develop a “yellow pages for the new generation”, which formed the origins of GreenSrch.com and Ads4Trees. “New Yellow.com was a basic directory run on open source software, which I heavily modified, and the idea was for every $10 you spend per month on advertising, we'll plant two trees in your business' name, and in that way you can offset your carbon footprint.”
Yes, Google is the be-all and end-all of search engines, but it does have weaknesses.
David and Googliath
But times were changing: pay-per-click was on the rise and Ash realised he had no performance benefits for advertisers. “I needed a pay-per-click service so it could become a performance-driven network, and if you look at PPC the obvious player you're going to come up against is Google AdWords.
“I thought: 'How is it possible to compete with AdWords?' So I looked at Google's carbon footprint because surely it's not infallible. There has to be some chink in its armour that could be used to build a better mousetrap.
“Yes, Google is the be-all and end-all of search engines, but it does have weaknesses.”
Not so crazy
Ash may have believed he'd found a flaw in Google's game plan but others weren't so easily convinced. “Our families, friends and colleagues thought we were crazy when we told them we wanted to compete with Google,” he says. But Ash thinks GreenSrch.com has something to offer and can provide a greener alternative to mainstream search.
“Whenever you do a search on Google it uses the same amount of power as boiling 500ml of water. So at the scale at which Google does distributed computing, yes, people get a result in less than 0.2 seconds, but is it worth the power usage, particularly when all its data centres are running on dirty energy?”
Google has gone to great lengths to make its data centres more energy-efficient, with a PUE of 1.14 (compared to the average efficiency rating of 2) and free cooling and water management. However, it doesn't use renewable energy to power its data centres, and this is where Ash saw an opportunity for competitive differentiation.
“I realised there is definitely a market here and a unique selling point, and that no one is trying this. What others like Bing are doing is just competing head-on in terms of brute force and Google has endeared itself so thoroughly to the public that it's really very difficult to compete in that way.”
Ash decided to run GreenSrch.com's servers completely on clean energy, basing its data centres at a German site that uses hydro-electric power. He plans to set up infrastructure in Iceland to complement this with geothermal energy supply. The aim is to plant 50 million trees within the next five years.
Benefits chain
“Once we started fleshing out the business model we decided it would be a green search engine and needed to have explicit environmental benefits,” says Ash. To incentivise the usage of the service, they decided to create earning opportunities for Web site content owners.
“Like Google has AdWords for advertisers and AdSpend for publishers, we have the same thing: an advertisers' network and a publishing network. So if Joe Soap goes to Ads4Trees and spends R1 000, we will plant one tree in his company's name.” Advertisers' content is featured on GreenSrch.com and the Ads4Trees publisher network, and a tree is planted for every 500 searches made per user.
Publishers that feature Ads4Trees ads on their sites can earn 40% of the click bid rate for each click from their site. There is also an affiliate programme whereby content owners receive 10% commission for every advertiser they successfully refer to Ads4Trees.
“We explicitly state what you get for your click. What the person paid for it and a full audit of where your clicks came from,” says Ash.
“Unlike Google, we encourage people to click on our ads. Google has this very strict policy of not incentivising clicks but we say, 'please support these companies because they care about the environment'. We want people to develop real benefit from going green.”
Ash believes it allows advertisers to access a growing green consumer base. “Lots of market reports show consumers are prepared to spend more with a company that has an explicitly green strategy or pro-environmental approach,” he adds. “It allows businesses to qualitatively tap into that in a measurable, performance-based way.”
The company is busy fine-tuning its capabilities and creating its own spidering and indexing systems, so ultimately GreenSrch.com will be 100% Google-independent. The plan is to have a fully-functional, independent search service in place within the next three months.
“We're looking at having up to 200TB of indexes,” says Ash. “Google has 2PB of indexes, so in a way we're rationalising search.” GreenSrch.com plans to index the first 15 million most popular searches which Google makes available, and also use page rankings to inform its results.
“We're not looking to index the entire world,” says co-founder and sales and marketing director David Hounson. “How many times do you look at the third or fourth page Google returns? If there are 3.6 million results, you're probably only going to see the first 10 or 20. It's wasteful. That's the kind of mentality we're trying to tackle.”
A new leaf
Unlike Google we encourage people to click on our ads.
Shout out
One thing both Ash and Hounson stress is their commitment to GreenSrch's tree-planting and employment initiatives. “Whether a company spends R100 000 or R10 000, 10% of that will be always be put back into a CSI programme,” says Hounson.
“It is a clone of Google in many ways but with green benefits, and we're striving to create employment in a major way,” adds Ash. The company has re-forestation projects in SA as well as Malawi, Honduras and Ecuador, with special care given to schools, low-income communities and orphanages. It favours indigenous trees with a high carbon sequestration value.
Ads4Trees has partnered with social enterprise Greenpop and Walkhaven Dog Park in Johannesburg for its reforestation projects. Hounson says they've also engaged with City Parks to help allocate land for tree-planting. The company also runs food garden campaigns, and clients can choose between tree-planting and garden projects, or a mix of the two.
He says the response so far has been positive. “We have a good target base here in SA, but where we're really getting good exposure is globally - Saudi, Germany, Austria, England, California.”
With the way income gets dispersed between the publishing network and affiliate network, their average net profit is at best 30%, according to Ash. “It's a slim operation. It's tightly run, but that's the only way we can really compete effectively with Google.”
Hounson adds that the focus is on the values behind the actions: “What we try to explain to people is why we're doing this; it's not what and how, it's why. And we're doing it to greatly affect people in rural communities.”
Ash believes the time is right for more socially conscious services, given changes in the global landscape. “When Google came out the world was very consumer-driven and self-centred - everyone was just worried about results. After that the dot-com bomb cleaned out a lot of the Wall Street greed, and now again with the 2008 recession and all the Occupy movements. People are questioning the very essence of capitalism, where the wealth is centred on the very few, with 1% of people in America earning way more money than the next 50%.
“It's in light of these inequalities that we're trying to build a new socially responsible type of business model that addresses these questions from the get-go,” he adds.
With this in mind, there's also a way for ordinary individuals to earn through the Ads4Trees network, says Hounson. A user can refer the site to an advertiser and earn 10% of whatever they spend, via the Mobipreneurz site. Mobipreneurz is still in testing phase but users can sign up in the meantime, and the service is set to go live within the next three months.
The main employment driver, however, is the actual tree planting, as it's a labour-intensive activity. “We've begun to look at it like mining, but where mining extracts resources from the planet, planting trees replenishes the planet's natural resources,” notes Hounson.
“That's why we're actually quite religious about these benefits, because so many people stand to gain if this business model succeeds and we get the uptake we'd like to get,” says Ash. “It might seem dreamy, but if we could get just 1% of the world's search market, the employment and job creation opportunities would be staggering.”
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