SEO Tool Ahrefs Built a $60M, Creator-Friendly Search Engine Named Yep (techcrunch.com) 28
In 2019 SEO toolset provider Ahrefs announced it would build it's own search engine, remembers Search Engine Land. After investing $60 million of its own money, this month that search engine has finally launched with the name of "Yep", and Ahrefs "is positioning it as a Googe competitor.
"However, we've seen plenty of Google competitors and Google "killers" come and go over the past two decades. So for now, let's just call it a Google alternative... Yep will not collect personal information (e.g., geolocation, name, age, gender) by default. Your Yep search history will not be stored anywhere.
What Yep will rely on is aggregated search statistics to improve algorithms, spelling corrections, and search suggestions, the company said. "In other words, we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way," said Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko.... What Yep will use is a searcher's:
- Entered keywords.
- Language preference received from the browser.
- Approximate geographical area at the origin of the search at the scale of a region or a city (deduced from the IP address)....
AhrefsBot visits more than 8 billion webpages every 24 hours, which makes it the second most active crawler on the web, behind only Google, Ahrefs said. For 12 years, AhrefsBot has been crawling the web. They had just been using the AhrefsBot data to power its link database and SEO insights. The Yep search index is updated every 15 to 30 minutes. Daily, the company adds 30 million webpages and drops 20 million.
Ahrefs said its Singapore data center is powered by around 1,000 servers that store and process 100 petabytes of web data (webpages, links between them, and the search index). Each server uses at least 2x 100GB connections... Before the end of the year, Ahrefs plans to open a U.S.-based data center.
"It's a unique proposition," reports TechCrunch, "running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.
"As for the name? I dunno; Yep seems pretty daft to me, but I guess at least the name is one character shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I'll only ever use by accident." Name aside, Yep is taking a fresh new path through the world of internet advertising, claiming that it's giving 90% of its ad revenues to content creators. The pitch is pretty elegant:
"Let's say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers," the company paints a picture of the future it wants to live in. "Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They'd be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary."
It's an impressively quixotic windmill to fight for the bootstrapped company Ahrefs. Its CEO sheds some light on why this makes sense to him:
"Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work...."
Perhaps it sounds a little idealistic, but damn it, that's what made me excited about Yep in the first place. It represents the faintest of echoes from a web more innocent and more hopeful than the social-media poisoned cesspool of chaos and fake news we often find ourselves in today.
Search Engine Land points out that DuckDuckGo, which launched in 2008, "gets as many searches per year (~15.7 billion) as Google gets in about two or three days. Even Microsoft Bing — which is owned by Microsoft, the third-largest company on the planet by market cap — has failed to make a significant dent in Google's search market share since 2009."
But they also quote Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko as saying in 2019, "If we succeed in our endeavors, Google will finally get some long overdue competition for search."
"However, we've seen plenty of Google competitors and Google "killers" come and go over the past two decades. So for now, let's just call it a Google alternative... Yep will not collect personal information (e.g., geolocation, name, age, gender) by default. Your Yep search history will not be stored anywhere.
What Yep will rely on is aggregated search statistics to improve algorithms, spelling corrections, and search suggestions, the company said. "In other words, we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way," said Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko.... What Yep will use is a searcher's:
- Entered keywords.
- Language preference received from the browser.
- Approximate geographical area at the origin of the search at the scale of a region or a city (deduced from the IP address)....
AhrefsBot visits more than 8 billion webpages every 24 hours, which makes it the second most active crawler on the web, behind only Google, Ahrefs said. For 12 years, AhrefsBot has been crawling the web. They had just been using the AhrefsBot data to power its link database and SEO insights. The Yep search index is updated every 15 to 30 minutes. Daily, the company adds 30 million webpages and drops 20 million.
Ahrefs said its Singapore data center is powered by around 1,000 servers that store and process 100 petabytes of web data (webpages, links between them, and the search index). Each server uses at least 2x 100GB connections... Before the end of the year, Ahrefs plans to open a U.S.-based data center.
"It's a unique proposition," reports TechCrunch, "running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.
"As for the name? I dunno; Yep seems pretty daft to me, but I guess at least the name is one character shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I'll only ever use by accident." Name aside, Yep is taking a fresh new path through the world of internet advertising, claiming that it's giving 90% of its ad revenues to content creators. The pitch is pretty elegant:
"Let's say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers," the company paints a picture of the future it wants to live in. "Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They'd be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary."
It's an impressively quixotic windmill to fight for the bootstrapped company Ahrefs. Its CEO sheds some light on why this makes sense to him:
"Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work...."
Perhaps it sounds a little idealistic, but damn it, that's what made me excited about Yep in the first place. It represents the faintest of echoes from a web more innocent and more hopeful than the social-media poisoned cesspool of chaos and fake news we often find ourselves in today.
Search Engine Land points out that DuckDuckGo, which launched in 2008, "gets as many searches per year (~15.7 billion) as Google gets in about two or three days. Even Microsoft Bing — which is owned by Microsoft, the third-largest company on the planet by market cap — has failed to make a significant dent in Google's search market share since 2009."
But they also quote Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko as saying in 2019, "If we succeed in our endeavors, Google will finally get some long overdue competition for search."
not for searching (Score:2)
> SEO Tool Ahrefs Built a $60M, Creator-Friendly Search Engine Named Yep
Right, creator-friendly, not searching friendly. In my limited experience, Yep is quite useless.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, it's beta. In fact, if you follow the link you'll find it say "beta" on the main page.
And I just tried it (on a really simple search) and it came back with at least one decent result as the first result.
It seems to be worth trying out. OTOH, it may be too soon to expect much, and I haven't, for instance, tried it on "dark wing" beetle. OK, I just did. Seems I misremembered the name, should have been "darkling beetle": https://bugguide.net/node/view... [bugguide.net] . That's not too bad.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with this thing is that it is like using Google from 20 years ago. Google has moved far, far beyond this basic keyword capability set, and they have done so because the average consumer has moved beyond this.
I don't see this going anywhere until they can add the type of knowledge-graph and semantic intelligent results that Google provides when you ask questions or the plethora of specialized results that get provided based on what the knowledge graph uncovers from a term.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see this going anywhere until they can add the type of knowledge-graph and semantic intelligent results that Google provides when you ask questions or the plethora of specialized results that get provided based on what the knowledge graph uncovers from a term.
...which is what, for me, makes Google search useless. Stop trying to figure out what you think I want and just tell me what I actually asked for!
Re: (Score:2)
Um, no.
Google gave me a link to the book on Amazon and 270,000 other hits containing the title or the author.
Fixed that for you.
SEO tool provider. (Score:3)
The fact that they are involved with SEO is an immediate turn-off for me. Much SEO has been or is either snake oil or gaming the algorithms with pages that are not authentic.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much. They are likely just optimizing the scam they got rich on.
Ironic that it doesn't show up on Google (Score:2)
A search for "yep" doesn't list yep.com on the first 10 pages. I don't think much of their SEO so far ...
Re: (Score:1)
90% to creators-but no details on how... (Score:3)
They say that 90% will go to content creators - but there is absolutely no details on how it will decide which creators get how much - or how they will even get the contact information to pay them...
Also, I will note that this is a share of advertising PROFITS, not revenues. Take a look at Hollywood motion picture accounting to see just how much they can minimize profits while making money hand over fist.
Weird results (Score:1)
I just did a search for:
telephone circle balloon feature
And my results were:
Youtube (in French)
Google support
Jewishpress
Bing
Lmu
2ici-sa
Dan
Re: (Score:3)
You should have tried "correct horse battery staple".
Blocked (Score:1)
Ahh... Ahrefsbot... Lovely. Blocked that shit years ago on all our servers. It wasn't respecting robots.txt and also behaved extremely annoying, almost DoS:ing our systems. Nah. I hope they crash and burn.
tried https://yep.com/web?q=yep+replace+googe (Score:2)
Yep? (Score:1)
Happy to see more competition (Score:2)
Very alternative search engine (Score:1)
It's bad (Score:2)
It's pretty bad. I tested it on a phrase: "first horse on the moon". It is a name of website in ".com" domain. Nothing on the first page had anything to do with that site.
First 4 results from Google have connection with correct this website.