Ahrefs recently announced its new privacy search engine, Yep.
The search marketing community is enthusiastic about the project on social media, but there are many questions.
We pass these questions on to Ahrefs and the CEO, Dmitro Gerasimenkoproviding the answer.
My first question is about the name of the search engine itself. Branding and choosing a domain name is an important process, and it’s always interesting to see how a company handles this important step.
1. What is the meaning behind choosing Yep as the search engine name?
It doesn’t have any specific meaning, but it’s a nice, short, and easy-to-remember name. You don’t forget “yes”, right?
Choosing a name for a search engine can be quite difficult.
Over the past 2 years, we have examined hundreds of ideas. Initially, the team settled with Fairsearch dot com and planned to transition to Fair.com. But we can’t get Fair.com.
Yep, his friends first appeared when we watched the Avatar cartoon, and “yip-yip” made their sky bison take off.
2. In an article published on Medium (Investor money and the public interest: Didn’t Google build a non-evil platform?), you cite Google’s Featured Snippets as an example of how Google can provide answers without leaving the Google site.
Does this mean Yep is committed to displaying search results in the classic ten blue link style?
Not really.
I don’t think it’s possible to serve customers well and grow market share with just 10 blue links.
Our promise is that search engines that generate revenue from advertising should share revenue with creators who benefit from their content.
In other words, if we choose some content to show up on the search results page, we also use it as a signal that the content is useful, and its creator should be compensated.
3. The Medium post cites the example of a blogger who teaches “how to build a container garden” and makes up to $4,000 a month. Here’s a real-world example of how much an average top-ranked website about container gardening can earn from Yep?
Hard to say average. Content should be compensated for its impact.
If we look at Google, they every year from what’s called “Google Search and Other” (Alphabet’s first-quarter 2022 results PDF format)
Let’s imagine that Google suddenly introduced a 90/10 profit sharing model. So they will distribute $135 billion annually to creators and keep $15 billion for themselves.
If you were the one making these decisions, how would you distribute $135 billion to content creators?
We can start with a simple thought process: Wikipedia is a huge contributor to Google’s success.
Content from Wikipedia may account for 5% of what people search for. If it’s really 5%, then Wikipedia should get 5% of the $135 billion or $6.75 billion in all contributions.
The whole news could be 10% or $13.5 billion.
along with Average salary of journalists in the US At about $50,000 a year, that’s enough to cover the salaries of 270,000 journalists.
E.g, The Washington Post employs about 1,000 reportersso you can imagine that 270,000 is a big team.
If we talk about a niche topic like gardening. Gardening as a whole is probably only 0.01% of what people are looking for (I’m just guessing the percentage, I don’t know the exact percentage).
At 0.01%, we could use 1/10,000 of the $135 billion to support creators who write gardening articles. That’s $13.5 million for gardening content.
In the gardening topic, a resource might hire a large team and cover any possible topic, serve 50% of search intent, and earn $6.75 million.
It is unlikely that we will get 1,000 resources, each with the exact same impact, each getting $13,500.
4. There are many people in the search community who have expressed enthusiasm for Yep on Facebook and elsewhere and want it to succeed.
But there are also those in the search marketing community who say that $60 million in search engine fees isn’t enough to compete with Google.
What is your response to those who think Yep is underfunded?
Competing with a big company like Google, while sharing 90% of the revenue, we obviously didn’t choose an easy way, and I understand the sentiment.
At the same time, I believe that what we do is important and worth the risk.
As a self-reliant company, Ahrefs has the option to commit to a 90/10 revenue share and stick with it.
Any venture-funded or well-funded company will have a list of investors who push to increase revenue permanently, and at some point it will be 85/15, then 80/20, and so on.
The $60 million is our investment in the Singapore data center. We have developed a 4x larger product in the US.
Regardless, the success of the new search will depend on the user’s interests. If our ideas convince thought leaders that supporting creators will make the internet better for everyone, users might give it a shot.
5. Some in the search community shared their opinion that it is difficult to get people to change their habits. What value-added services does Yep provide that will force users to switch from Google to Google?
Bootstrapping is hard until it works.
A revenue share model is a very powerful tool for attracting people in the know.
We hope bloggers will ask their readers to switch to yes, and there will be a snowball response. The more users searching on Yep, the more the creators earn.
Someday someone will tell their friend that their mother posted a blog and got a revenue share from Yep, and that will change that person’s choice.
Users may tire of their favorite news source showing twice as many ads on Google than on Yep, and switch the default search on their device.
6. Why does Yep show links to Google and Bing in some search results?
Yes, it doesn’t yet provide the best results for all types of queries. But we want people to try to make it their default search engine.
If Yep isn’t serving you well, these links should help.
The idea is that we’d be better off giving a quick option to look at another search engine than having people change the default.
7. Will Yep participate? index now?
Yes, we plan to participate.
8. What do publishers and SEOs need to know about Yep optimization?
Create useful content for people 🙂
9. I noticed that for some local searches that show spam in Google, these same queries don’t show spam in Yep.
Does Yep focus on spam like spam links and spam?
We’re always improving our algorithms to improve quality content, reduce spam, and reduce the impact of spammy links.
10. Does Yep use BERT and other NLP techniques?
Yes, we closely follow the latest developments in the application of ML to language processing to pick and combine applicable ideas and approaches.
11. Your privacy page states that Yep does not store search history or IP addresses.
Does this mean that anyone using Yep can be sure of 100% privacy, with nothing on the user’s computer and nothing on Yep’s servers?
It’s not “store nothing”, it’s “store as little as possible” to make the system work.
We remove the user agent and prune the IP before storing the logs. We also use salted and hashed versions of IPs and User-Agents without querying for up to 48 hours to prevent DDOS and abuse.
Yes, cookies are not used by default unless you change some default settings.
Since we have our own search index, we do not call third party APIs and we do not share any of your information with third parties.
We will update our Privacy Policy as we refine the details.
I believe Yep is the most private search engine out there, and we hope it is.
12. Will Yep show rich results like recipes?
Yes, we’re constantly improving the look and convenience of our search results pages.
13. Does Yep use structured data?
We only use a fraction of it.
yes search engine
Yes, when it comes to “Do not be evil By promising to give back to the content creators who made the search engine possible in the first place.
To some extent, the sensitivity to the content creator role is not surprising, as Dmytro Gerasymenko, CEO of Ahrefs, has close working ties to the search marketing community.
