How does SearchScene make money?

SearchScene makes money from advertising, just like Google, Bing and other search engines. The big difference is that, instead of making our shareholders rich, we donate 95% of our profits to charity, helping to make the world a better place.

When you perform a search on SearchScene, you will sometimes see ads listed at the top, bottom and sometimes to the side of the main search results - just as you would find on Google, Bing and other search engines. These ads are clearly labelled as sponsored listings. If you click on one of these ads, we will get a portion of the cost that the advertiser paid for the click. This is called pay per click (PPC) advertising. The same business model is used by Google and Bing.

In some circumstances, we may also make money from affiliate links, but this will only happen if you click on one of these links and later make a purchase from the merchant site.

Who provides the ads?

Our ads are provided by Microsoft Bing. Advertisers pay to advertise on Bing, and choose to also advertise on Bing's partner search engines, of which SearchScene is one. Bing take a small cut of the advertising fee and pass the rest on to us.

How much money do you make per ad click?

The amount we make from each ad click varies enormously. Some search queries, e.g. searches for credit cards or loans, will result in ads that may pay out a few dollars per click. Other search queries, e.g. searches for birthday cards, will typically just pay out a few cents per click.

Can I help SearchScene by just randomly clicking on ads?

No. In fact, randomly clicking on ads on SearchScene may hurt us. Randomly clicking on ads with no intention to buy anything from the merchant site is known as click-fraud. Any unnatural click-activity (e.g. a disproportionately high number of ad-clicks, as a proportion of search queries, coming from the same IP address) results in any revenue we may have earned from those ad-clicks being removed by our search partner, Bing. If this sort of activity continues, Bing may penalise us or suspend or even terminate SearchScene as a search partner. This would be bad! Please don't randomly click on our ads!