Search engine toolkit company, Ahrefs recently revealed that they’ve been working behind the scenes on their own search engine called Yep and have invested $60 million in it. Yep’s unique offering is that it will run its own search index rather than relying on Google or Bing APIs.
Forging A New Path For Creators
Yep, though the name is one character shorter than the second largest search engine, Bing, it claims it’s forging a new path in the world of internet advertising by offering to give 90 percent of its ad revenue to content creators. The pitch is quite 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.”
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Fighting for Ahrefs, a bootstrapped company, is an impressively quixotic windmill. Its CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko, explains why he thinks this is a good idea:
“Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work. 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,” says Ahrefs founder and CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko, and continues to make the point that his search engine is meant to be heavily privacy-forward.
“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 and the position of the link getting the most clicks. But we won’t create your profile for targeted advertising.”
Perhaps it sounds across as somewhat utopian, but that’s precisely what excites me about Yep in the first place. It’s the faintest of echoes from a web that was once more innocent and promising than the social-media poisoned quagmire of turmoil and bogus news we’ve become accustomed to.
Built On A Solid Foundation
The company’s decision to build its own data centers is remarkable; it claims to have more than 1,000 servers up and running, storing more than 100 petabytes of data. Given that cloud-based solutions are typically more flexible, Gerasymenko has a plan for that as well, noting that they are significantly more expensive for such huge infrastructure, with a goal of hundreds or thousands of high-end servers running at full capacity 24/7.
Of course, the project didn’t begin with a search engine; the company already had a large dataset from its regular operations. For the past 12 years, Ahrefs has been crawling and storing web data in order to provide its customers with its core product: an SEO toolset. The search results are powered by AhrefsBot, the company’s own crawler, which visits more than 8 billion web pages every 24 hours, according to the company. The company claims the new search engine will be available in all nations and most languages.
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So, $60 million without any outside funding? That’s a lot of money—where did all of it come from? According to the company, revenues from paid subscriptions were re-invested. The company claims to generate $100 million in annual sales from its more than 50,000 customers and has so far avoided external investment. The company is based in Singapore and has 90 employees. A total of 11 people work on the search engine project, including data scientists, backend engineers, and front-end developers. According to the firm, Gerasymenko is actively involved in the development of the search engine.
About Ahrefs
Ahrefs is, first and foremost, a backlink checker. Link building has changed a lot, but contrary to popular belief, it’s far from dead. Knowing who links to the biggest sites in your industry can be the first step in building quality links of your own.
Identifying links has always been the cornerstone of Ahrefs, which sets it apart.
But it’s a whole lot more than that too, and there are all sorts of nifty and useful SEO features like rankings, referring pages, keyword tools, and more.
In short, it’s the ultimate tool to learn from the best sites, to get ideas, and learn from for implementation in your own context on your own website.