Yep by Ahrefs – A New Search Engine Competing with Google
Ahrefs is giving us Yep! You might be thinking Google is dominating, and the monopoly is too much. Google does not care about who you are when its sophisticated algorithm is in play to affect your ranking on the SERPs.
What if we have a search engine that promises to share 90% of its revenue with content creators and website owners?
It sounds interesting. Yep just promised that!
What is Yep
Yep is a multi-purpose web search engine. Yep will be available in nearly every country and language in the future.
Ahrefs view it as a Google competitor. For the time being, we'll refer to it as a Google alternative.
Ahrefs founder launches Yep early this month, June 2022, with an estimated investment of $60M. The goal of Ahrefs is to make Yep a content-friendly search engine.
The idea is surrounded by creating a search engine running its search index rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.
The primary concern for the founders behind this project would be acquiring the necessary resources to beat the market leader, which is Google.
Google has a lot of data they rely on to make their search engine Geotargeting and searcher’s intent friendly. Are we supposed to be talking about its Chrome browser, Play store, Email (Gmail) tool, Map, and others that make it have more relevant data about the user, which help serve the searcher near to perfect result?
Yep is an excellent Innovation. No need to downplay the brain behind this but a call to get to work and gain enough market share if they do what Bing, yahoo, and DuckDuckgo cannot do.
How Yep Search Engine works
You will probably be wondering if there is a need to move to Yep, even if you are going to, what are the ranking factors for its Ranking Bot?
Nathan from GotchSEO shared an insightful view about the Yep ranking factor. Here is the video that explains his exciting findings.
You might be thinking, can backlink be a ranking factor on Yep too?
The short answer is. Yes, it is. Surprisingly, the Yep algorithm favors websites with tons of backlinks, including more Edu and Gov links.
What is expected of this new search engine?
According to Dmitry Gerasimenko, the founder of Ahrefs, “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,”
This idea was first developed in 2019 when Ahrefs announced they would be introducing a new search engine to create this win-win situation.
The truth is, as more as we wish this new search engine to succeed, various things need to be tackled if yep wants to gain enough market share.
The CMO of Ahrefs, Tim Soulo, has already called the public to notice that this first release is a Beta test. Indeed, we expect something more if the new search engine needs to gain some traction.
What to learn from Bing and other search engines
Effective search necessitates good answers to a slew of complex issues.
To begin, you must keyword index all web-based material. That in and of itself necessitates substantial computing infrastructure: the internet is vast and constantly changing, and users expect fresh content to appear on your site within minutes of its publication.
The second requirement is that your index is valid. It is not sufficient for users to put “dog” into the search bar and see every page on the internet that contains the word “dog.” Pages must be rated, which is a difficult challenge in and of itself. What criteria do you use to determine whether a page containing the word “dog” is more likely than another to contain the user's response? How do you deal with people reshaping their material to improve their search rankings? How do you recognize fact-based inbound requests and link them to fact-based sources?
The third need is that your index is adaptable. Google frequently auto-completes a query I write into the search bar before I finish typing. I maintain that degree of responsiveness by keeping all relevant data in memory on a computer that is physically close to me. This necessitates more server hardware investment than indexing and search algorithm optimization.
The fourth requirement is that you be able to profit from it. Without a lot of money, you can't compete with Google. You must be able to make money from searches. Suppose you can't persuade people to pay you for the privilege of using your tool (so far, only the Encyclopedia Britannica has had much success with this, and they can do so because they own a repository of high-quality content that they wrote themselves). In that case, you'll have to look for another revenue source, such as advertising. Google's advertising system is advanced.
The good news is that the prospect of making a lot of money is a compelling motivation to compete with Google. Companies already attempting to tackle the technical difficulties that Google has solved – such as running vast numbers of servers at scale – have a significant head start on the competition, which is how Bing can generate a significant amount of revenue for Microsoft. Amazon and IBM have massive processing infrastructures that they're currently using for cloud computing and running the world's most extensive distribution system. On those platforms, they could efficiently perform a search.
The competition is investing time and money in phrases, natural language, and anticipatory search emerging from keyword search.
Building a Google-quality search engine is a challenging endeavor that takes time and money. Bing has been a massive initiative for Microsoft, but in terms of quality and market share, it still trails Google.
Yep Search Engine Mission
1. Privacy
Yep Promise not to use any third-party search indexes to power its search service. That means they will not be sharing your search query with any 3rd-party service.
As the world is going cookieless, They are promoting the concept by not using cookies by default. However, you get the chance to change your settings; internet cookies will only be used to store those specific changes.
2. YepBots
The New search engine will be using data collected by AhrefsBot to build its web index and search engine service. They will be introducing YepBot In the future.
3. Profit-Sharing
As previously said, the search engine is created to make it content creator-friendly. According to Yep, “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.”
“Let's say that you love pancakes more than anything else. 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.”
Here is what Ryan Stewart has to say about the profit-sharing concept
How to submit your website to Yep
You might probably be wondering, like everyone out there, about how to submit your website to Yep, the way you submit your sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yandex.
Right now, there is no way to submit your website manually, the founders behind this product have not communicated this to the public, and we will be on the lookout for it just like you.
Conclusion
Many technical issues need to be improved with this new search engine. There is a need to have excellent servers and infrastructure to power this project and avoid downtime as more people adopt it.
Talking about the cookies and privacy, these are data that make searches and online content relevant and personalized to the users.
Whoever pushes these privacy policy laws has to think twice about small businesses and start-ups. We hope the new Yep search engine project succeeds.
