I'm building a climate-focused search engine
Telborg is an AI application that uses data from government publications, company filings and international agencies (such as IEA, IRENA, IPCC) to provide the most up-to-date, relevant and credible responses to Climate researchers. Here’s a demo.
I’ve been speaking to Climate researchers at universities, international organisations, think tanks, policymakers, climate funds, consultancies and I keep hearing of 2 problems:
Finding all the relevant and updated Climate regulations, policies, reporting standards, laws that apply in a given situation
Finding credible government data. This is especially hard for countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
Interestingly, most of the information lives in the public domain or is derived from publicly available inputs. Availability is not the challenge, access is:
scanned documents and excels to scour through
translation needed for many government publications
don’t know which government document the data is living in
government websites are NOT SEO-optimised
if you have a metric for one country in one document, what’s the related document for another country
once you find a data point, you also need to determine how recent it is
Lot of work in getting data on companies - from public filings, annual reports, other documents they publish
This is a systemic problem. Everyone is looking for the same figures from the same sources, but making regular trips to dark recesses of the internet to look for them.
There are some tools/solutions for this:
Google/ChatGPT/Bard/Perplexity - unfiltered dataset, no check for credibility
Bloomberg & Reuters - expensive
Industry-focused databases and niche tools (e.g. weather, batteries, minerals forecasting) - do not provide political/economic/social data that feeds into understanding the impact of Climate initiatives. Users sometimes buy subscriptions for these for as long as required.
Ask experts - inefficient, time consuming, limited to network size, still need to find citations for the numbers they give. Hard to find experts with system-level understanding.
Climate Policy Radar/Grantham Institute Climate Laws - semantic search on global climate laws and policy. Limited scope at the moment.
There are lots of individual datasets and niche tools, no comprehensive search engine. Telborg will differ from these on scope (Climate + Energy only; global), accuracy, credibility of data, relevance and ease of use. The industry is severely underserved technologically. There’s potential for a Github - hosting & collaborating on organisation data, Stackoverflow - forum for Q&A, and a better LinkedIn too - all that can grow organically on top of Telborg.
Recent AI developments make document processing and better search possible. And the user base is expanding everyday. Listed companies across the globe have had to submit sustainability reports for many years now. Each year, the number of companies required to do this increases - because the size of the company required to report this keeps getting smaller. Also, reporting Scope 3 emissions means getting sustainability data from all your vendors and suppliers across the globe. The largest companies have in-house sustainability teams already, many more will set them up. Climate research is no longer limited to academic, government and international institutions.
Now is the time to build this.