The SEO toolset provider Ahrefs announced its own search engine in 2019. Ahrefs has invested around $60 million to launch this new search engine called Yep.
What is Yep?
Yep is a web search engine that will soon be available in most languages and all countries. Ahrefs is positioning this search engine as a Google competitor. However, there were many other Google competitors that were launched in the past two decades but did not get popularity like Google.
Privacy
Yep will not collect personal information of users such as name, gender, age, and geolocation. Also, your Yep search history will not be saved anywhere. Yep will rely on aggregated search statistics to improve algorithms, search suggestions, and spelling corrections.
Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko said that ‘we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way. For example, we will track how many times a word is searched for or what is the position of the link getting the most clicks. But we won’t create your profile for targeted advertising.” You can use the Yep search engine by clicking here or typing “yep.com” on your web browser”. It means that Yep will track how many times a word is searched for. It will also track the links that are getting the most clicks. But it will not create any user profile for target advertising.
Yep will consider the keywords entered by searchers, language preference obtained from the browser, and approximate geographical area at the scale of a city or region.
Profit-Sharing
Ahrefs search engine works on the plan of a 90/10 profit-sharing model which means that Ahrefs shares 90% of the profit from advertising with content publishers. Yep are planning to promote content writing.
Gerasymenko further said that ‘Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work’. He further added ‘We saw how YouTube’s profit-sharing model made the whole video-making industry thrive. Splitting advertising profits 90/10 with content authors, we want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry’.
The business strategy of Yep is to highlight high-quality content. The 90/10 profit-sharing model is expected to reward independent media, professionals, and enthusiastic people for their contributions while promoting high-quality content to support any particular webpage of search engine results
How Yep Works
The main thing that matters for Yep is the search quality. Yeb is aimed at satisfying the needs of searchers. So, how does Yep work to put together the search results?
Crawling
Yep gathers website data by using Ahrefs bot. Ahrefs bot has been crawling the web for 12 years. The Ahrefsbot data is used to power its link database and SEO insights .
Ahrefs has announced that it will replace Ahrefsbot with Yepbot in the future.
More than 8 billion web pages are being visited by Ahrefs every 24 hours. It means that it is the second most active crawler on the web after Google.
Indexing
Yep update its search index every 15 to 30 minutes. It adds 30 million web pages and drops 20 million daily.
Other Technical Details
The Singapore data center of Ahrefs is powered by approximately 1000 servers that store and process 100 petabytes of web data. The web data includes web pages, links between them, and the search index. At least 2x 100GB connections are used by each server. Multiple GPU cards are also being used by some servers to train big transformer models. Ahrefs has also planned to open a U.S.-based data center before the end of the year.
The Ultimate Goal of Ahrefs
In 2019, Gerasymenko said “Considering the platform only generates a fraction of the company’s $120 billion revenue, the organization could easily revamp Bing under a profit-share model. It’s my prediction that the positive public sentiment alone would have greater ROI than existing ad revenue. If we succeed in our endeavors, Google will finally get some long overdue competition for search.”
The goal of Yep is to attract the interest of a big company like Microsoft that can bring the idea to scale.
Yep Search Results
The search result pages of Yep are minimal. The options are news or web results. Knowledge boxes on the right side of the search result pages are also there that feature content from Wikipedia,
Bottom Line
After the launch of Yep, Google will have more completion now and creators will have more options. Let’s see where the new search engine of Ahrefs, Yep is going to take the industry in the future. If Ahrefs can successfully keep its promise of privacy, and give the content creators a huge share of profits, it may have a winner in form of Yep.