The search engine market has been very hot for the past two decades, and many companies are trying to compete with Google in the “online search industry”; Even the governments of many countries, for various reasons, have tried to launch a local/national search engine for their citizens.
If you’ve come across this article, you probably know that Yep is a search engine like Google, but you do not know enough about it. In this article from Twilinstok, we are going to introduce this search engine and examine its technical capability in comparison with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave and other search engines. So stay with us until the end.
What is Ahrefs?
If you are a webmaster or SEO, you are no doubt familiar with the powerful Ahrefs tool; But to learn more about the history of the Yep search engine, you first need to know a little more about Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is a multinational startup based in Singapore. The company specializes in the production and development of online SEO software and tools; Ahrefs also provides free training materials to marketing professionals and is developing these training materials. It is not bad to know that the most important policy of this startup company is to make meaningful and easy-to-use products.
Ahrefs motto is:
“First do it, then do it right, then do it better.”
Accordingly, the company rapidly changes (updates) its software products and online tools to meet the needs of its customers to always satisfy them.
The founder and CEO of Ahrefs is a man named Dmitry Gerasimenko. He created his first document search engine when he was only 15 years old; As Dimitri grew older, his interest in search engines never waned, and in 2007, he revived his old interest – search engines for documents and files. It is interesting to note that this, after three years, led to the birth of a database of backlinks in the Site Explorer section of the powerful Ahrefs tool in 2010.
It is worth noting that before Ahrefs launched its Site Explorer division, the market for backlink analytics in the SEO industry was stagnant; But with the launch of Site Explorer by the company, a new round of competition emerged among SEO tool providers, and Site Explorer quickly became one of the best backlink analysis tools in the world.
Ahrefs has been growing since its inception; Today, the company is able to update its backlink database every 15 minutes, and its crawlers are able to process 8.0000.0000 pages per day; It will be interesting for you to know that this creep rate is more than one third of the creep rate that Google bots do on a daily basis!
We have said all this to get to the point that Ahrefs, due to its technical and financial capabilities, has focused part of its focus on implementing a search engine that can compete with Google since 2019! Of course, this is not just an idea, but from 2019 to 2022, he has spent about $ 60 million out of his own pocket to build and implement this search engine; The search engine is called “Yep”.
You will learn more about this search engine in the following; So join us.
What is a Yep search engine?
As mentioned, Ahrefs, a company known for building SEO tools and educating its users about SEO and digital marketing, has introduced its search engine as “Yep” and is developing it. Yep is a versatile web search engine that will soon be available in all countries and in most languages. It is worth noting that Yep – unlike many local search engines – does not receive its data from Bing or Google, but has already collected 1000 petabytes of data and can work independently of other search engines.
One of the most important features of Yep is that:
- Privacy of users
- and the rights of content producers
It emphasizes and Ahrefs’s strategy for its development revolves around these two axes. These two axes are very important both for users who are going to use Yep for their daily searches and for content creators, and can be a great incentive to migrate from Google to this new search engine; Because web-based users tend to keep their privacy and information safe, content publishers also want to make more money from the content they produce on the web.
Of course, it goes without saying that other search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. have also tried in recent years to increase their share of the search engine market in the world; But to be realistic, none of them are actually competing with Google today; Because in the search engine market, Google owns and controls more than 70% of searches. With that said, Ahrefs has made a bold move, spending more than $ 60 million out of pocket to build a search engine that can compete with Google!
To access the Yep search engine you can visit www.yep.com.
What is the advantage of Yep search engine for ordinary users?
As mentioned, the most important advantage of the Yep search engine for Internet users is their privacy and information. Although search engines need to retrieve certain information and logs from their database and archive them in their database in order to provide users with optimized results, many search engines take vital information and logs from users; Information and logs, many of which may not be necessary to optimally display search results, and this can mean a violation of user privacy. The following is the information that Yep receives from users to optimize search results:
- Keywords entered by users
- User language priority (this information is received from the user’s browser)
- Approximate geographical area of users at the source of the search at the scale of a region or a city (derived from IP address).
In other words, the Yep search engine has stated that by default it does not collect users’ personal information such as: name, age, exact geographical location, gender, etc., and their Yep search history will not be stored anywhere. According to Ahrefs, what Yep will rely on is mass search statistics to improve algorithms, spelling corrections and search suggestions.
What are the benefits of a Yep search engine for content publishers?
It is safe to say that most publishers operate solely for the purpose of “earning money for the production of content”; Hence, most of them are looking to earn more from this job. The amazing advantage that Yep has for content creators and publishers is that it gives them 90% of its advertising revenue and only gets 10% back! This profit sharing model can be a very, very big incentive for many people who are seriously involved in the web content industry.
If you’ve not been surprised yet, let the following figures and examples make you. Let’s assume that the world’s largest search engine generates $ 100 billion a year; Now imagine that they give 90% of that revenue ($ 90 billion) to content producers and publishers; In that case, Wikipedia would probably make billions of dollars a year from its content !!! With this in mind, Wikipedia website owners can easily opt out of applying for donations and start paying decent salaries to the people who produce their articles or refine them by updating them.
Aside from this big Yep advantage, Google has a big downside that many content creators may not even be aware of! And the downside is that in many cases, Google shows the internal content of websites directly on its results page (SERP); In this way, users get their answer from the same SERP page, without the need to click on a website link and enter it, and this is for content publishers who aim to increase their website traffic; It would be a big flaw; Because they will lose traffic to their website, the reduction in traffic will also mean less revenue.
To understand this better, suppose that Internet users search for recipes for foods or desserts such as vegetables or pancakes; Google SERP page is designed in such a way that users search for such words, get their answer completely and do not need to click on a specific website to learn how to prepare these snacks! In this case, publishers in the culinary industry may not benefit much. (Remember, of course, that Google’s weakness for content publishers is also a huge advantage for Internet users because they get the answer to their search as quickly as possible.)
“Content producers and publishers who generate Yep search results are, in any case, entitled to pay for their work,” said Grasimenko, founder and CEO of Ahrefs. “We saw how the YouTube profit sharing model boosted the entire video making industry,” he added. “With the 10/90 advertising profit sharing model with content writers, we want to move towards fair treatment of talent in the search industry.”
The Search Engine Land website says about Yep:
“With Yep, content producers and publishers will no longer need payment walls and affiliate links to make money; Thus, publishers who are forced to chase traffic with click-through articles and fill their pages with ads can focus solely on the quality of the content they produce and return to quality research and analysis. For example, a citizen journalist who discovers corruption alongside a full-time job can make money without having to spend time managing his or her content; “Or a chef who teaches how to prepare food creatively can easily make money this way.”
The bottom line is that independent content producers everywhere can finally thrive. Of course, all this seems good in theory; But do not forget that Yep has just been launched and has a long way to go to implement these ideals in the real world.
How does Yep work?
As for how Yep works, it’s best to start with how it crawls the web. The Yep search engine now collects website data from the web using AhrefsBot; AhrefsBot is capable of crawling more than 8,000,000 web pages every 24 hours, making it the second most active crawler on the web, after Google. It is worth noting that this bot has been crawling on the web for 12 years, and this has led to the creation of huge databases of links to various websites and help Ahrefs executives to gain in-depth insights into SEO and search engines.
It should also be noted that the Yep search index is updated every 15 to 30 minutes; Adds 30 million web pages daily and decreases 20 million pages. However, Ahrefs has announced that it intends to replace YepBot with AhrefsBot in the near future; So YepBot is expected to be much more powerful than what we know about AhrefsBot.
Now that you are familiar with the quality and creep power of the Yep search engine, it is better to know the other technical details. Ahrefs has announced that its Singapore data center is equipped with about 1,000 servers that store and process 100 petabytes of web-level data (including: web pages, links between them and search index); Each of these servers uses at least 2x 100GB of connectivity, and some of these servers use multiple GPUs to train large Transformer models. Also, it is not bad to know that Ahrefs intends to establish another data center in the United States and open it by the end of 2022.
What is Ahrefs’s ultimate goal in building the Yep search engine?
“The goal of the Yep search engine is to get the attention of a larger company (Microsoft, for example) that can implement the idea on a larger scale,”
said Ahrefs founder and CEO Dmitry Grasimenko in 2019.
“Given that the Yep platform generates only a deficit of Ahrefs’s $ 120 billion in revenue, the organization can easily upgrade and strengthen the Bing search engine under a Profit-Share model,”
he added.
So my prediction is that public positive sentiment – alone – will have a higher return on investment than existing advertising revenue. “If we succeed in our efforts, we can compete with Google in the long run.”
Can Yep be a replacement for Google?
Although we’ve seen a lot of search engines come and go in the last two decades, Google is by far the most dominant search engine on the market, with Bing in second place; Nevertheless, alternatives are becoming increasingly popular. DuckDuckGo and Brave are two examples of search engines that protect users’ privacy, and the Yep search engine will be another such search engine.
But the big question is, how can Ahrefs make Yep a real competitor in the established search engine market? The answer is that if Ahrefs can live up to its promise of privacy, while giving substantial profits to content creators, it is possible that Yep could become a strong competitor to Google over time, or even Replace with it.
In the end…
In this article, we tried to answer common questions about Yep search engine. The idea behind Yep is a great idea; Because without content producers and publishers, there is really no room for search engine development; So, it’s not bad if these engines share more of the revenue already generated by content producers and publishers. It should also be noted that Ahrefs is serious about its new project; Because without attracting any foreign investment and out of pocket, it has invested $ 60 million to build and develop the Yep search engine.
If you, dear audience, have a comment or opinion about the “Yep search engine“, or you know a specific point that is not mentioned in this article, please share your valuable views through the comment section at the end of this article.
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