SEO Tool Ahrefs Invests in Yep, A Creator-Centric Search Engine!
Ahrefs, one of the best SEO tools providers, announced in 2019, that it will build its own search engine. Since then, Ahrefs has invested three years and $60 million into designing and launching a new search engine ‘Yep’.
Table of Contents
Comprehensive Understanding of Yep
Yep, is a general search engine, and will soon be available in most the languages all around the globe. There will be an announcement after the official launch.
Ahrefs is personifying Yep as a competitor to Google, but time will tell, as over the past two decades many search engines threatening to compete with Google have come and gone. So, on the safe side, let’s just call it an alternative to Google.
The Notion Behind Its Name
According to Ahrefs, the name Yep has no particular meaning, and the team unexpectedly came up with this name while watching Avatar cartoons. Aang and his friends used ‘yip yip’ to make their bison take off, where the word ‘yep’ struck a chord with the team.
Hunting the right name for the search engine was a real task, and the Ahrefs’ team pursued hundreds of ideas in a span of two years, but nothing felt right. Finally, the team concluded with the name Fairsearch.com which could be shortened to Fair.com, but Ahrefs could not get this name.
Then, some team members suggested the name ‘Yep’ and it got the affirmation from other team members as well. Thus, this short, easy-to-remember, simple name ‘Yep’ was finalized.
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What makes Yep better than other search engines?
As per Ahrefs, there are some crucial features that make Yep, a better search engine than its counterparts. Here is the list of features that makes Yep unique.
- Privacy
Like Google or other search engines, Yep will not collect personal information like geolocation, name, gender, and age, by default. That means a user’s Yep search history will not be stored anywhere.
On the contrary, Yep will resource on aggregated search statistics to enhance search suggestions, spelling correctors, and algorithms.
In Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko’s words, the search engine will save certain data but not in a way that makes a user personally identifiable. In simple words, the company will save data to track the number of times a word is searched and the position of the link getting the most clicks, but it will not curate any user’s profile for targeted advertising.
Yep will only use data such as language preference as received from the browser, entered keywords, and approximate geographical region deduced from the IP address.
- Revenue-Sharing Model
Initially, Ahrefs mentioned a profit-sharing model, but later cleared that and stated that Yep will have a revenue-sharing model. Yep will follow a 90/10 revenue-sharing model, where the search engine will share 90% of its advert revenue with the content publishers.
The makers of Yep pointed to a shortcoming in Google and rectified it while curating their own search engine. Google shows content in the search results, and any user can relish a piece of information on Google without clicking through the website. As a result, websites lose traffic and less traffic leads to less revenue for a plethora of websites.
Gerasymenko cited the example of YouTube’s profit-sharing model and how it thrived in the video-making space. In his opinion, the content creators who make search results possible deserve to be paid for their work and this is a way to treat talent fairly in the search industry.
According to Yep, if the biggest search engine for example earns $100B a year and gives $90B to the creators and publishers, what a good form of remuneration and encouragement it will be for talent across the globe. Yep also cited the example of Wikipedia, stating if other search engines (read Google) would have followed a similar model, the former would not ask for donations and remunerate the writers who enhance their articles a good salary.
A revenue-sharing model will shun the need for paywalls and affiliate links and the publishers will no longer need to use clickbait articles to garner traffic or fill their pages with ads. Creative minds could concentrate on curating quality content in place of running for traffic.
- Simplicity
One of the major reasons making Yep better than other search engines is its intuitive working. You need not be an expert to make money with Yep.
For example, you have a passion for something and want to flourish it further. Post blogs, articles, or images pertaining to it, and get paid a fair share for the same. This will work as a catalyst to encourage content creators globally.
How will the revenue-sharing model work?
Let’s take an example to understand it better. If Yep gets $100 from an advertiser, Yep will have the $10, and the remaining $90 will be added to the distribution fund for creators.
However, they are still drafting specifications on this, and the creators will require to verify their identity by email or Twitter. Next, the creators will need to add tags to their web pages, and Yep will distribute the revenue according to their impact.
According to Yep, any person, publisher, brand, or website can be considered a ‘creator.’
Also, for 100% transparency, Yep plans to make the audited revenue report public.
Yep has packed itself with features that are unique to the other search engines and their prime competitor Google, but how far it will go will be decided with time, as Yep has not even launched yet.
Many search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Microsoft Bing to name a few tried denting the position of Google, but miserably failed. DuckDuckGo hardly gets 15.7 billion searches per year which Google gets in just 2-3 days. Microsoft Bing although it has a big name supporting it, could not come anywhere closer to Google.
Plans about PPC Advertising
There will be no announcement in this regard until the team is delighted and satisfied with the relevancy and quality of the organic search results. This is a very early stage to comment on Yep’s PPC advertising strategy.
How Will Yep Work?
Search quality is the most crucial element of a search engine, and Yep has to concentrate on this to crack the game. How is Yep planning to do it?
- Crawling
AhrefsBot will be replaced with YepBot in near future, and this helps Yep in collecting the website data. AhrefsBot is the second most active crawler in the world following Google. For the 12 years that AhrefsBot has been crawling, the data was used to power its link database and SEO insights.
- Indexing
The company adds 30 million webpages daily and drops 20 million, and the search index is updated every 15 to 20 minutes.
Also Read – Top 10 Tools for Content Creators
Final Words
Yep is a search engine backed by one of the best SEO tools providing company Ahrefs, and the on-page plans and models look unique. However, after the search engine is launched, and given to the end-users, the real fate will be sealed then.
