Back in 2019, SEO toolset provider Ahrefs announced its plans to build a new search engine. Although popular opinion swayed towards thinking nothing would materialise from this, Ahrefs has officially revealed their own new search engine, dubbed ‘Yep’.
What is Yep?
Yep is a new general purpose search engine developed by Ahrefs. Positioned as the Google competitor, Yep prides itself on two things that will deem it a worthy contender to the G:
- Privacy
- Profit sharing
While the former may not necessarily sound like a new concept, Yep will not collect any personal information by default, and your Yep search history won’t be stored anywhere.
As said by Ahrefs CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko:
“We do save 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.”
Yep will rely on aggregated search statistics to improve things like:
- Algorithms
- Spelling corrections
- Search suggestions
Here’s where things get interesting – Ahrefs plan for Yep to demostrate a 90/10 profit-sharing model, where Ahrefs shares 90% of its ad profit with content publishers.
The company’s reasoning for this is actually quite sound; Google displays content in the SERPs, without the need to click through to a website – this ultimately means a loss of traffic for sites, resulting in less revenue.
As said by Gerasymenko:
“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.”
Here is what Yep has to say:
“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.
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.
There would be no more need for paywalls and affiliate links, so publishers who’ve had to resort to chasing traffic with clickbait articles and filling their pages with ads would be able to get back to doing investigative pieces and quality analysis. A citizen journalist uncovering corruption on the side of a full-time job could get compensated without having to spend time trying to monetize content.
And the best thing? You don’t have to be an expert to benefit.
Let’s say that you love pancakes more than anything else in the world. Now you have an incentive to grow that passion – imagine getting fairly paid to share creative recipes, publish photos of your creations and teach the rest of the world how they, too, can make the fluffiest pancakes ever. Independent creators everywhere will finally be able to flourish.”
How does Yep work?
This is how Ahrefs plan on going about putting search results together in Yep.
#1 Crawling
Yep will collect website data using AhrefsBot, which the company plan on replacing with YepBot in the future.
AhrefsBot is the bot responsible for powering Ahref’s link database and SEO insights. Interesting fact – AhrefsBot is the second most active crawler on the web behind Google, with more than 8 billion webpage views every 24 hours.
#2 Indexing
Yep’s search index gets updated every 15 to 30 minutes. On a daily basis, 30 million webpages are added, while 20 million are dropped.
