OCG vs OceanHero
Two search engines that clean the ocean, but one big difference.
Here's how OCG compares to the OceanHero search engine
By Felix Millar (Co-founder at OCG)
It’s a very hot and humid September in Bali, Indonesia. My plane finally touches down after a rough, what felt like forever eighteen hours plane trip from Gatwick, United Kingdom.
Despite the jet lag and intense heat, I’m nervous and equally excited!
Two months ago, I had reached out to my friend (now co-founder) expressing my plan to move across the world and live in Bali.
It was the perfect timing! Mike explained his idea to build a search engine that would directly clean the ocean, and Bali would be the perfect location for setting up cleanup operations.
Fast forward to 2021, one year and a few months later. OCG is now a well established search engine with over 20,000 daily users and over 10,000,000 total web searches!
Our teams across South-East-Asia have successfully recovered over 450,000 pounds of plastic waste from the oceans and coastlines.
So OCG is also search engine... Whats the difference?
It’s true, Oceanhero’s search engine may look more aesthetically pleasing to some users. However the technical part is almost identical to OCG.
Both search engines use Microsoft’s Bing to display search results, and both generate revenue in the same way.
Each time a user clicks on a advert, OCG and Oceanhero receive money from Bing or Bing’s advertising partners.
The difference lies in how the money generated from advertising is actually used.
Oceanhero provides PlasticBank with a percentage of this revenue (They do not reveal how much they donate, but previously we saw a figure of 10%)
Let’s say they’ve increased that and now give 20% of revenue… That still comes nowhere as close as the 100% that OCG commits to cleaning the ocean.
Oceanhero is a for-profit organisation.
Yes, PlasticBank are a great organization. But to claim that Oceanhero are cleaning the ocean is not directly true.
Essentially how PlasticBank operates is they offer a financial incentive for communities to exchange in plastic bottles. These bottles are then recycled.
A great system for the prevention of plastic bottles entering the ocean. But the majority of plastic bottles handed to PlasticBank are not removed from the ocean.
While damaging, plastic bottles are not typically a harmful type of plastic waste to marine life either. Marine animals rarely consume plastic bottles or get trapped inside plastic bottles.
Examples of plastic that have a much more life threatening impact are:
- Plastic bags (easily consumed and easy to get trapped in)
- Fishing nets (typically the most harm harmful)
- Microplastics
OCG tackles all of these and more.
Instead of donating money to charities where most of the money gets filtered and goes on expenses other than cleaning the ocean, we clean the ocean ourselves.
We employ our own cleanup crews and run our own cleanup operations.
We don’t pay the majority of revenue to our founders. In-fact we don’t pay anything. We set-up OCG to clean the ocean.
We remove all types of plastics from the ocean and coastlines, not just plastic bottles which are convenient to recycle.
And we use 100% of the search engine revenue to do this.
The difference is clear. Use and switch your search engine to OCG if you want your searches to directly clean the ocean.