The search engine toolkit company Ahrefs just told me they’ve been working on their own search engine on the sly and put $60 million in resources into their own search engine called Yes. It’s a one-of-a-kind offering, with its own search index rather than relying on Google or Bing APIs.
What about the name? I’m not sure; yes, it appears silly to me, but I believe the name is at least one character shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I’ll only use inadvertently. Aside from the name, Yep is forging a new path in the world of internet advertising by claiming to give 90 percent of its ad revenue to content creators. The pitch is quite sophisticated:
“Assume the world’s largest search engine earns $100 billion per year. Imagine giving $90 billion to content creators and publishers,” the company says, describing the future it wants to live in. “ Wikipedia’s content would most likely generate a few billion dollars per year. They could stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary.”
It’s an impressively quixotic windmill to fight for the bootstrap company Ahrefs. The CEO sheds some light on why this makes sense to him:
“Those who enable search results are compensated for their efforts.” We’ve seen how YouTube’s profit-sharing model has helped the entire video industry thrive. We want to give a push to treat talent fairly in the search industry by sharing the 90/10 ad profit with content authors,” said Ahrefs founder and CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko, continuing to emphasize that his search engine is heavily intended to be privacy-aware. “We keep certain search data, but never in a personally-identifiable format.” For example, we track how frequently a word is searched for and where the link receives the most clicks. However, we do not create your profile in order to target advertising.”
It may sound a little idealistic, but damn, that’s what got me interested in Yep in the first place. It is the faintest echo of a web that was more innocent and hopeful than the social media-polluted cesspool of chaos and fake news that we frequently find ourselves in today.
I was surprised to learn that the company decided to build its own data centers – it claims to have already booted over 1,000 servers and stored more than 100 petabytes of data. Given that cloud-based solutions are more flexible, it’s an odd choice, but Gerasymenko has a plan for that as well, claiming they’re much more expensive for such extensive infrastructure, targeting hundreds or thousands of high-end servers running 24/7 under full load.
Of course, the project didn’t begin with a search engine; the company already had a massive dataset of its day-to-day operations. For the past 12 years, Ahrefs has been crawling and storing data across the web in order to provide its customers with its core product: an SEO toolset. The search results are powered by AhrefsBot, the company’s own crawler that, according to the company, visits more than 8 billion web pages every 24 hours. According to the company, the new search engine will be available in all countries and most languages.
So, $60 million with no outside funding? That’s a lot of money; where did it all come from? According to the company, it has reinvested its earnings from paid subscriptions. The company claims to have a current annual revenue of $100 million from its more than 50,000 customers and has so far avoided outside investment. The company employs 90 people and is based in Singapore. There are 11 people working on the search engine project, including data scientists, backend engineers, and frontend developers. According to the company, Gerasymenko is actively involved in the development of the search engine.
