So let me get to your great suggestion about becoming a non-profit, which I interpret to mean give away 100% of the profits. First, we already tried to address your question a little our FAQ here http://goodtree.com/about/faq#17 and here http://goodtree.com/about/faq#18 . Second, we plan to write much more about this on our GoodTree blog (forthcoming) http://blog.goodtree.com because we think it’s an important debate. Third, sadly, the fact is we don’t know if we can ever turn a profit sending 50% of gross revenue to charity. Most companies who give anything send 2% of profits (Ben & Jerry’s) or around 0.2% of gross revenues. Even in the case of Newman’s Own, where they send 100% of profits, it’s usually around 10% of gross revenues. Let’s look at our competition. If Google gave 100% of their profits, it would be approximately 34% of their gross revenue. GoodTree is committing 50%. If Yahoo gave 100% of their profits, it would be around 20% of their gross revenue. So as it would be impossible for Yahoo or Google to give 50% of gross revenue — they would go out of business — it will be hard for us, too.

But let’s assume GoodTree is able to get profitable. We are evangelists of small talented teams trying to solve the world’s major challenges with technology, while making it sustainable and rewarding by trying to turn a profit at the same time. We believe you can combine those two goals in one organization. Furthermore, we think there are many of the world’s challenges which may end up being better accomplished with this approach, and we think GoodTree is one of them. Why? It seems much more likely to us that a for- profit entity like GoodTree can hire and motivate a more talented team, build a better product, that stays more innovative (to keep its users from going back to search engines who give nothing or nearly nothing to social causes), and ultimately give more money to social causes, than a non-profit approach. The GoodTree product needs to be as good as MSN, or Google, or MyYahoo for GoodTree to make a difference. The way we see it, SearchKindly and GoodSearch and others are not GoodTree’s competition — together we have only 0.01% of the market. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Comcast have 95% of the market and they don’t give any of their revenues to charity. That’s our competition. That’s who we have to take users from. It’s not about GoodTree vs GoodSearch. It’s about GoodTree and GoodSearch and SearchKindly vs MSN, Yahoo and Google.

If GoodTree has a product that is inferior to MSN, then GoodTree will never even get 1% of the market. GoodTree has to have a product that is comparable to the big guys, and I don’t mean just the search results. We’re not a match for the big guys yet by any stretch, but to have a shot, we need the speed and talent to get us there. This is the kind of thing I’m taking about: http://goodtree.com/e It’s our customizable home search page. Right now, about 50 million people worldwide use a customized home search page like this (most on MyYahoo, some on Google/ig). In the next 4 years, we think 250 million people will have a home page like this (there are over 1 billion people on the Internet now). If GoodTree doesn’t have a great customizable home search page, with open API’s, 1000’s of widgets, integration with the social networks, etc. we will always be small and users will get hooked to Yahoo and MSN where none of the money goes to social causes. It hasn’t been easy for us to develop this technology, but it’s getting better every week, and may allow us to compete effectively. We couldn’t have done it without very talented people, who Yahoo would pay handsomely to go work in Mountain View down the highway.

GoodTree is a nice idea; however, if charity was the #1 reason for GoodTree, OogaLabs would donate 100% to charity instead of 50%. Why would a $100M company need to keep 50% of GoodTree’s revenue? So they can sell it later for a HUGE profit if it works out. This is the part that they aren’t so blatent and up-front about on GoodTree’s “about” page.

In addition, you’ll notice the actual search results are inferior to those of, for example, Google. Why would I use GoodTree when I can get better results from Google? Oh yeah, so a $100M company can contribute 50% to charity. Whoop-di-do.

Ooga- here’s a suggestion… if you are really feeling charitable, convert GoodTree into a non-profit and up your donation schedule to 100%.

http://www.SearchKindly.org

Leave a comment on the wall!

We also offer something else that the others don’t–relevant search results! We decided to use Google to power the searches made on our site, so you don’t have to really give anything up in terms for the sake of charity.

Please let me know if you have any questions and please check us out. We’re supporting the Save Darfur Coaltion this month and our goal is to raise at least $1000 for them.

Thanks,
Syed

And yeah, it would be interesting if they have google/wiki search.

Regarding the last comment, the GoodTree team is not from Tickle. GoodTree has a policy against serving pop-ups, and GoodTree has no paid subscriptions. At GoodTree, we are focused on creating the best possible service we can for users. This means we will work hard to respond to and to address user complaints. User complaints are something that come with running any online business — it’s worth noting that most of the complaints listed above were ultimately resolved. Either way, a lot of lessons were learned at Tickle and now I’m excited for this new team to apply all of those lessons as well as your feedback in creating GoodTree. Thanks so much again for your feedback! James

I just searched online and found that Tickle.com has an unsatisfactory rating with the Better Business Bureau – http://www.goldengatebbb.org/commonreport.html?bid=40351

I also search for “tickle.com complaints” and “tickle.com fraud” and found pages and pages of complaints. Here are a few:

Complaints.com
http://search.complaints.com/search?q=tickle&site=complaints&client=complaints&proxystylesheet=complaints&output=xml_no_dtd

ConsumerAffairs.org
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/tickle.html

We detail GoodTree more here: http://www.goodtree.com/about/about The site includes full disclosure about how monies are earned and disbursed, it includes our address in San Francisco, and several places to email us. We’re responding to email much faster now. We’re also adding to the About Us and the FAQ everyday.

As we say on our website, we give 50% of the money to charity, not 25%. We have our address on our site, and you can email us anytime. We don’t yet have enough people to answer a phone number promptly yet, so we haven’t put one on the site, but we hope to in as soon as we can handle it.

We’re sending out the first checks to the charities this month (from activity on the GoodTree site in July – August) totaling close to $9,000.

We’re hiring independent auditors so you can know we are accounting properly and paying the charities. We will also be publishing our financials on the site so you can see we are being totally transparent about what goes on and how it works. Until the last few weeks, we didn’t have any financials to publish or audit. We’re just getting going.

We are not using any of the charities’ names or logos in our promotional copy or marketing and any charity that doesn’t want to be included is free to opt out.

We are contacting each charity by phone and with a check in the mail, although we haven’t reached all of them yet. Every charity we’ve talked to so far is happy to be involved and receive checks. Iamgo, which non-profit do you represent?

We will be developing a set of UK charities for the UK, Canadian charities for Canadians, Australian charities for Australians and Indian charities for Indians. We’ll add other countries as requests come in.

There is no press on us because as you have pointed out, we are not ready. We’ve just been proving to ourselves that the concept will work and we can provide the right software systems to support it. Once again, the blogging community is scooping the traditional press. But there is a reason I have refused to talk to journalists: We’re not ready!

As the GoodTree website explains, our results are the combination of Google results, Yahoo results, Microsoft results and Ask.com results. The aggregation of those results and the backend work is done for us by InfoSpace, a public company based in Seattle, WA, USA.

We are working to build different displays for search results so people can choose the format that feels right to them. If you don’t like the results layout the way we have it now, we hope to provide you with alternative in the coming weeks.

We will be publishing a blog, describing the ongoing efforts to bring GoodTree to life, and do good in the world.

We have 3 ways of letting people spread the word. One of them is to send an email to the people in their address book on Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. In order for people to access their address books, they need to log in to those address books, so yes, they enter their email and password, but we do not save anyone’s passwords. This is a very common practice used by many online companies. We are not a phishing site, we are not trying to get your information.

We are trying to build a very useful and safe web service that lets lots of regular people contribute to charities without it costing them anything, and hopefully encouraging them to get more involved in doing good (we’re coming out with more features by the end of November so people can find each other and take inspiration from each other).

I hope our slow start doesn’t turn too many people off in the future. We are taking action on the things you are questioning here, and we ARE sending money to charities in exactly the formula we present on the site. Thank you for your patience,

James Currier

- Domain name registration has no meaningful contact information (BAD)
- No address or telephone number on web site (BAD)
- No full disclosure of how monies are earned or disbursed (REALLY BAD)
- No method of reporting for listed non-profits (BAD)
- No attempt to contact the non-profits that are actually listed (NUTTY)
- Requests email username and password (a phishing technique) in order to “spread the word”. (BAD)
- Calling the number on the domain record offers nothing more than a standard voice mail greeting. (BAD)

So far, my findinds aren’t looking very good. I am working now to remove my organizations name from the list.

I agree that its list of organisations is limited and way too US-centric for my liking (no I don’t feel inspired to support your troops) but I found sufficient organisations to support. To be able to support any you named would create enormous administration and ethical problems I would have thought. Even if I only contribute a couple of hundred dollars a year, it is a start.