Benelab, the Search Engine That Gives Back

A lot of teens these days are too occupied with social media and video games. Not Jack Kim. The 17-year-old high school student from Seattle, Washington is busy managing his company Benelab. Oh, and he's helping make the world a better place in the process, too.

The non-profit corporation, which Kim runs with his classmates (no adults allowed), donates 100 percent of its revenue from web searches to a different cause each month. It all started when Kim was a freshman at King's High School in Shoreline. He had just learned how to code HTML and make websites. Kim though it was “pretty neat” and set up his first site – a simple search engine that brought in between $200 and $300 per month from 2,000 monthly visitors.

“That's when I learned that the search engine was the way to go – you can make a lot of money for such little traffic,” says Kim.

He decided he would use that money to help others. Kim subsequently launched Benesearch.com, which was powered by Google's search engine. After attending a summer business program at Stanford, he relaunched Benesearch as Benelab.org, which now routes its searches through Bing.

According to Kim, “Our mission is to make philanthropy easy and more accessible.” And what's easier than doing a web search?

While they had to work on a tight budget, Kim and his team haven't let the challenge stop them from bringing their vision to fruition. So far, Benelab has made donations to charity: water, Pilgrim Africa, and Vittana, among others. This month, the startup will be benefiting World Concern to send five children to school for an entire year. Benelab's target of $400 will cover tuition, books, and writing materials.

As Kim explains on the Benelab blog, “The reason we chose this cause is that we, especially I, believe that education is a huge stepping stone in coming out of poverty and empowering an individual to achieve more.”