Nonprofit search engine donates 80 per cent of profits to other nonprofits

The company aims to become the best search engine and donate 80 per cent of their profits to organisations and charities with a proven track record

Spotted: The European non-profit search engine, Ask.Moe, donates 80 per cent of profits to other non-profit organizations and charities with a proven track record. 

Ask.Moe currently uses Google’s Programmable Search Engine, which is free to use as long as it includes Google’s advertising. However, this means that Google also knows who submitted the search query. The company decided that instead of being privacy-focused, they would strive to become the best search engine and donate 80 per cent of their profits to organisations and charities with a proven track record. Ask.Moe is also working on implementing support for users to allow them to vote for non-profit organizations and charities of their choice.

Ask.Moe offers separated key categories, including Search, Finance, Domain and Maths which the company believes will further differentiate them from other search engines. Future plans involve expanding their own services, such as media hosting and note-taking.

Everything that is built by Ask.Moe in-house will focus on protecting user privacy. For example, their currency exchange relies on data from the European Central Bank, stores the data in cache, and does not log any requests. Similarly, their domain name finder uses DNS lookup rather than third-party APIs and does not log the lookups, meaning users don’t have to worry about somebody else snapping up their desired domains after checking for their availability.  

Ask.Moe is working on implementing their own browser as well as creating search-specific categories that sift through a small subset of the internet to provide high-quality data. Currently, Ask.Moe supports “Code” search, which searches about 150 websites related to software development. According to the team, this is a great way to filter out websites that engage in SEO spam while also providing high-quality results. 

At present, Ask.Moe is similar to Ecosia, a search engine that spends 80 per cent of their profits on planting trees. The main difference, however, is that Ask.Moe uses Google while Ecosia uses Bing. Ecosia also focuses exclusively on tree planting. 

Ask.Moe founder Michael Frandsen told Springwise: “We want to give our users the ability to choose how much money should go towards which organizations and charities, whether they’re focused on relief and development, the environment, animals, health and disabilities, user privacy, or something else.”

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