Ahrefs, a search engine toolkit company, just told me that they have been working on their own search engine, called Yep, for the past year and a half. It is a unique proposition, running its own search index, rather than using any of the major search engines.
Is the name related? I guess at least the name is shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I will only use by accident. Yep claims to give 90 percent of its ad revenues to content creators. The pitch is well thought out.
The biggest search engine in the world makes a lot of money. Imagine if they gave $90 billion to content creators and publishers. It would likely make a few billion dollars a year from its content. It would be possible for them to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary.
The windmill is quixotic to fight for Ahrefs. This makes sense to its CEO.
The creators of search results deserve to get paid. The entire video-making industry flourished because of the profit-sharing model. Ahrefs founder and CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko, says that they want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry by splitting advertising profits. We don't save data in a personally identifiable way. We will be able to see how many times a word is searched for and the position of the link gets the most clicks. We don't create profiles for targeted advertising.
I was excited about Yep in the first place because it sounded a little idealistic. It is more hopeful than the social-media poisoned cesspool of chaos and fake news we find ourselves in today.
I was surprised that the company decided to spin up its own data centers, as they claim to have more than 1,000 server already spun up. It is an odd choice, given that cloud-based solutions are usually more flexible, but Gerasymenko has a plan for that as well, with a goal of hundreds or thousands of high-end server running under full load 24/7.
The company already had a large amount of data available from its day-to-day business, so the project didn't start with a search engine. Ahrefs has been crawling and storing data about the web for over a decade in order to provide its customers with its core product. The company claims that it visits more than 8 billion web pages a day. In most languages, the new search engine will be available.
$60 million with no investment? Where did it all originate? The company said it reinvested its revenues from paid memberships. The company says it has $100 million worth of revenues per year from its more than 50,000 customers, and has not invested in other companies. The company is located in Singapore. A team of 11 people work on the search engine project. The company tells me that Gerasymenko is involved in the creation of the search engine.
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