Well, this is straight off the table “didn’t see it coming,” but search engine toolkit company Ahrefs just told me they’ve been working on their own search engine quietly, plowing $60 million of resources into its own engine. search engine, called Yep. This is a unique proposition, running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.
As for the name? I do not know; Yep it seems pretty crazy to me, but I guess its name is at least a character shorter than Bing, another major search engine I’ll only use by accident. Name aside, Yep is taking a fresh new path through the world of internet advertising, claiming that it delivers 90% of its advertising revenue to content creators. The pitch is quite elegant:
“Say that the world’s largest search engine makes $100 billion a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90 billion to content creators and publishers,” the company paints a picture of the future it wants to live. “Wikipedia will probably make several billion dollars a year from its content. They will be able to stop asking for donations and start paying people who polish their articles a decent salary.”
It’s an impressively generous windmill to champion the Ahrefs-booted company. His CEO explained why this made sense to him:
“Creators who enable search results deserve to be paid for their work. We saw how YouTube’s revenue-sharing model made the entire video creation industry thrive. Sharing 90/10 advertising profits with content writers, we want to give a push to treat talent fairly in the search industry,” said Ahrefs founder and CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko, and continues to emphasize that his search engine is meant to be very privacy-forward. “We do store certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way. For example, we will track the number of times a word is searched and the position of the link that gets the most clicks. But we will not profile you for targeted advertising.”
It might sound a little idealistic, but damn, that’s what got me excited about Yep. It represents a faint echo of a web that is plainer and more hopeful than social media poisoned by the chaos and fake news we often find ourselves in today.
I was a little surprised to learn that the company decided to open its own data center — it claims to have more than 1,000 servers up and running, storing over 100 petabytes of data. This is an odd choice, given that cloud-based solutions are usually more flexible, but Gerasymenko also has plans for it, claiming that they are much more expensive for such a vast infrastructure, with hundreds or thousands of high-end servers running. 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 data about the web for 12 years to provide its customers with its core product: a suite of SEO tools. 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 the new search engine will be available in all countries and in most languages.
So, uh, $60 million without external investment? That’s a lot — where did it all come from? The company explains that it reinvests its revenue from its paid subscriptions. The company claims it currently has $100 million in annual revenue from its more than 50,000 customers, and has so far avoided external investment. The company has 90 employees and is headquartered in Singapore. The search engine project has a team of 11 people — including data scientists, backend engineers, and front-end developers. Gerasymenko himself played an active role in building the search engine, the company told me.