Well, that’s right from the desk of “I didn’t see it coming,” but search engine toolkit company Ahrefs just told me they’ve been working on their own covert search engine secretly, plowing $ 60 million in resources f their hands. search engine, called Yep. It is a unique proposition, running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.
As for the name? I don’t know; Yes it seems pretty daft to me, but I think at least the name is a shorter character than Bing, the other major search engine I will ever use only by accident. Name aside, Yep is taking a whole new path in the world of online advertising, claiming that it is giving 90% of its advertising revenue to content creators. The pitch is quite elegant:
“Let’s say 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 you want to live in.” Wikipedia probably earns a few billion dollars a year from its content. They will be able to stop asking for donations and start paying a decent salary to the people who illustrate their articles. ”
It is an impressive 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 be paid for their work. We’ve seen how YouTube’s profit-sharing model has made the entire video-making industry a success. Sharing 90/10 advertising profits with content authors, we want to drive fair treatment of talent in the search industry, ”says Ahrefs founder and CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko, further stressing that his search engine is meant to be very “privacy-forward.” We save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way. “We will not create your profile for targeted advertising.”
It may sound a little idealistic, but damn, that’s what got me excited about Yep in the first place. It represents the lightest echo of a more innocent and hopeful web from the reed of chaos and fake news poisoned by the social media we often find ourselves in today.
I was a little surprised to learn that the company has decided to introduce its own data centers – it claims to have more than 1,000 servers already twisted, storing more than 100 petabytes of data. It’s a strange choice, as cloud-based solutions are generally more flexible, but Gerasymenko has a plan for that as well, arguing that they are much more expensive for such extensive infrastructure, with the goal of working hundreds or thousands of high-end servers. under full load 24/7.
Of course, this whole project didn’t start with a search engine – the company already had a huge data set available from its day-to-day business. Ahrefs has been crawling and storing web data for 12 years to provide its customers with its flagship product: a set of SEO tools. The search results are powered by its own crawler – AhrefsBot – which the company claims visits more than 8 billion web pages every 24 hours. The company claims that the new search engine will be available in all countries and in most languages.
So, er, $ 60 million without external investment? That’s a lot of dough – where did it all come from? The company explains that it has reinvested its revenue from its paid subscriptions. The company claims that it currently has $ 100 million a year in revenue from its more than 50,000 customers, and so far avoids external investment. The company has 90 employees and is headquartered in Singapore. The search engine project has a team of 11 – including data scientists, backend engineers and front-end developers. Gerasymenko himself is playing an active role in building the search engine, the company tells me.
