Yep: Ahrefs launches its own search engine

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools enjoy great popularity, especially among SEO experts, and offer extensive analysis functions. With Yep, the company is now launching its own search engine. Does Google have to fear a new competitor?

Yep: New search engine enters the stage

Via Twitter, Dmytro Gerasymenko, founder and CEO of Ahrefs, confirmed the existence of the new search engine called Yep, which was featured in an exclusive article on TechCrunch. Around 60 million US dollars are said to have gone into the development, which was completely financed by the company itself in the background.

The Yep wants to work completely independently of Google or Bing and not use any of the companies’ APIs. Instead, it relies on its own search index, as well as an internal server infrastructure that is not connected via the cloud.

That good results can be achieved should be almost certain given Ahrefs’ long history. Since its founding in July 2010, the company has been crawling the entire Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, storing according to its own statement petabytes of information about live websites. The content index already acts as a “small search engine” and discovers 30 million new websites per day. It also updates values for 420 million sites every 24 hours.

What does Yep want to do differently?

Is there even a market for yet another search engine? And what does Yep want to do differently than top dog Google, which dominates the search engine market with a share of around 90 percent (in second place, by the way, is Microsoft alternative Bing with a market share of around three percent)?

On the one hand, Yep states it is focusing on content creators and wants to pay out 90 percent of advertising revenue directly to content creators.

“We’ve all become accustomed to a search model that is undoubtedly unfair. A model in which paywalls and affiliate links have insidiously become a part of the search experience. Yep is our answer to that,” they write on the new search engine’s website.

So they want to provide a private search experience that rewards content creators. 90 percent of the revenue, for example, from advertising, therefore go directly to the creators. However, sites such as Wikipedia are also to benefit from this and rely less on donations, the statement continues.

Another cornerstone of Yep is data protection. Personal information and search history are not to be collected or shared, the company promises. In addition, no cookies are used by default.

Only the search terms entered or the preferred language of the browser would be recorded. Advertising IDs or the like are not supposed to exist at Yep, however. At least in the area of profit distribution, the search engine opens up a new niche that could be quite interesting for content creators.

Currently Yep is already launched in a first version. However, it does not yet display any advertisements or similar. In addition, the search engine links on request to other competitors such as Google, Bing, Mojeek and DuckDuckGo. There is also no German translation yet.