I don't trust Ahrefs at all. The whole SEO industry is tainted, and Ahrefs is not a good part of it.<p>I don't want a search engine that pays "creators" (a search engine finds things, if they want to monetize it it is after it is found). I want a search engine that runs exactly as many ads as are needed to pay for itself, nothing more. Preferably with an option to pay for myself as an option. I'm guessing that means <a href="https://kagi.com/" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/</a> but I would like to see some more competition.
Let's see... Under their proposed profit share, if they achieved DDG levels of traffic (100M queries/day, assuming $0.01 per query in net ads profit, that is $900k/day distributed among conservatively speaking 10M creators/sites) distribution would be $0.09 /day to an average content creator owning an average site.<p>It does not sound much. If it was to magically fully replace Google tomorrow (10B queries/day) it would generate $300/month for 10M creators.<p>Assuming content creator needs $5k/month to make a living, Yep would need to achieve ~160B queries/day which is ~16x scale of Google (problem: not enough humans).<p>The idea sounds noble on paper but it seems that math does not check. Missing something?
Ahrefs is the biggest reason why Google results are so bad nowadays.<p>While they call it SEO, this site gives you the very metrics which every so called SEOer uses to game Google search results (and it's very good tbh).<p>I hope they are ready to face the seo monster they have created and yep can't be gamed as easily.
From the AHREF founder's blog post[1], Yep is designed more as a PR and hiring stunt with the aim of getting Microsoft to revamp Bing with a publisher revenue share model.<p>"Considering the platform [Bing] only generates a fraction of the company’s [Microsoft] $120 billion revenue, the organization could easily revamp Bing under a profit-share model."<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-did-google-fail-to-build-a-non-evil-platform-3a054f996ea9" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...</a><p>As a side bet, any takers on how these types of visionary projects / PR stunts will become the new norm for hiring in a post covid lockdown world? Especially since working from home is no longer a differentiator.
I was excited to see this, because I often wondered why Ahrefs didn't try making a search engine out of their index. Unfortunately, the results are really terrible, in specific ways:<p>* One of my websites is not showing up at all, even though it's a site I've added into Ahrefs and that they crawl every month to send me monthly reports. That site has an Ahrefs Domain Rating 20x higher than my other websites, so it isn't being omitted for reasons of obscurity or quality.<p>* Yep seems to be processing backlinks in the wrong direction. If I do an ego-search, instead of listing sites that mention my name, it lists sites that I have linked <i>out</i> from my own blog.<p>* Pure spam results, like random casino websites in the middle of search results. Or is that Yep's business model?<p>* Entirely random results. Not idea why the Fox homepage would show up on an ego-search for myself.<p>But Yep's results were better than what I got with Brave Search, so they might still be onto something.
As with most supposed Google killers, it suffers from the small issue of being terrible.<p>Right now I'm in Los Angeles and looking to buy a roll of film. When I search for "where to buy film in los angeles":<p>- Google gives me three top Maps results, all small photo stores relevant to my search, a Yelp results page, some relevant reddit discussions with recommendations, and then sites for some individual businesses.<p>- Yep gives TripAdvisor results for movie theaters, Fandango, ZipRecruiter results for film jobs, film studios, and some more theaters (and also an article about rent control for some reason).
From their About Yep page: "We built Yep from the ground up so that we can give 90% of ad revenue to content creators."<p>And yet there is nowhere around the site explaining how creators can claim that "revenue".
I love how there are now many little search engines trying to differentiate themselves from Google.<p>A few others worth checking out are:<p>1. <a href="https://search.brave.com" rel="nofollow">https://search.brave.com</a> (they use their own index / my personal favourite)<p>2. <a href="https://kagi.com" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com</a><p>3. <a href="https://neeva.com" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.com</a>
Sounds nice, I'm all for more search engine competition even regardless of the revenue share model. I'm curious how exactly they pay creators though? If I had a super-popular blog that got millions of hits a month through search, does that mean they'll send me a check or something? Also, what about sites like YouTube that mainly host content created freely by others?
Maybe redundant, but how do you actually join? On their web site I do not see any partner etc. page, so how do they actually share that profit?
I have so many questions:
- how do they share profit? by number of visits? then how to avoid fake sites and those that copycat other ppl content?
...
Why are all Google Search alternatives founded on gimmicks? Where is the startup with a straightforward pitch like "better results than Google, $5/mo"?
There was a time when for every new search engine that came out after about my first five searches, I was like:<p>Nah, that isn't gonna cut it.<p>Then DuckDuckGo came along and I immediately felt that it was going to be good enough for me - and it has been for many years and still is.<p>Now with Kagi and Yep it is the first time after DuckDuckGo that I feel the same. Playing around with both of them for a while, I think they'd be both good enough[1] for my purposes.<p>I'm happy with DuckDuckGo and it has almost[2] completely replaced Google for me, but I'm also relieved that now we seem to have viable alternatives for the first time now. I hope more are coming.<p>[1] When it comes to the quality of the results, both are on par in my opinion. What differentiates Yep from its competitors is that it is based on an independent index, which I think makes it interesting from a technological standpoint. I won't comment on their respective business models, because I have not thought much about that...<p>[2]<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947588" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947588</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040833" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040833</a>
Seems like they have to do a lot of work to increase the relevance of the search results.<p>Query "ahrefs founder name"<p>Yep: <a href="https://yep.com/web?q=ahrefs+founder+name" rel="nofollow">https://yep.com/web?q=ahrefs+founder+name</a><p>Google: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=ahrefs+founder+name" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=ahrefs+founder+name</a><p>The expected result is Ahrefs about page but Yep is not even close and I agree with some HN comments Google results are worse today because of tools like Ahrefs, not sure I would trust their search engine. I would rather stay with kagi.com/google.com
yep.com is remarkably similar to fairsearch.com, another search engine built by ahrefs which advertises a revenue share. In fact, “Read the story behind Fairsearch” and “Story behind Yep" on their respective home pages both link to the same blog post. Also, both websites have identical 'bot' pages (<a href="https://fairsearch.com/fairbot" rel="nofollow">https://fairsearch.com/fairbot</a> and <a href="https://yep.com/yepbot" rel="nofollow">https://yep.com/yepbot</a>).
Can we maybe not have daolf's editorial/opinion as the title? The page title is just "Yep", which granted, says nothing.. but so does linking to a search homepage. Maybe the last blog post is a better url/title [Investor money vs. public interest: did Google fail to build a non-evil platform?](<a href="https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-did-google-fail-to-build-a-non-evil-platform-3a054f996ea9" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...</a>)
The business model isn’t really the problem with Google. It’s the quality of search results.<p>Which after one simple search on Yep, seems to still be 100X better.<p>Don’t focus on a better business model. Build a better product first.
<p><pre><code> Our system is big part custom OCaml code and also employs third-party technologies - Debian, ELK, Puppet, and anything else that will solve the task at hand. In this role, be prepared to deal with 25 petabytes storage cluster, 2,000 bare-metal servers, experimental large-scale deployments and all kinds of software bugs and hardware deviations on a daily basis.
</code></pre>
Company is based in Singapore, but where are the servers? No way you're hosting 2k servers there, the costs are just too high.
Wait, what? Ahrefs should know better than anyone that this is insane. Imagine explaining to the current SEO industry that Google would now be <i>paying</i> them based on how good they were at juicing the algo. Higher rankings, more clicks, *moar money*. It's bad enough already, this would be blood in the water for organic content.<p>I feel like I'm missing the trick here.
This is early 2000s thinking where you believe people will read things. Audio, video, and images are what the masses consume in bulk, and to make money in advertising you need to use one of those formats.<p>You'd make far more converting your content to a podcast or YouTube channel and using affiliate product placement.<p>Anything else becomes a cat and mouse game with ad blockers.
The "Why is this good for search?" paragraph here <a href="https://yep.com/profit-share" rel="nofollow">https://yep.com/profit-share</a> shows how a world could be better without Google being greedy. It just makes me sicking thinking of how cancerous Google is right now to the Internet.
Jesus has no one in this thread ever build a legitimate product online and tried to get noticed by legitimate customers that will get value from the tech you build?<p>SEO is something you just have to do, can't get around it for some products. Some of it you can think of like how you have to follow bullshit conventions to make a resume easy to understand for recruiters. And others is just plain getting your name out there.<p>The competition around black hat SEO and spam content is disgusting but what can you do, just gotta try to get more links. Here my analogy would be how we all complain about inflation and housing prices but then when you wanna move to SF or Seattle you will still participate in the madness and bit 100k over asking price.
Found a bug, where is my bounty?<p><a href="https://yep.com/web?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com" rel="nofollow">https://yep.com/web?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com</a>
Bummer it does not have image search. Still have to use Google because its image search - specially the file type filter, and letting search for things like SVGs.
Competing heads-on with Google makes no sense; They already nailed the product on desktop and they are decades ahead in R&D.<p>At most you can attack it from a niche like voice-activated search, video search, Smart TV searches or car-searches.<p>The real opportunity to disrupt them was mobile search but they also saw that and went aggressively after it. The next big mainstream opportunity probably is when brain-to-computer links such as neuralink become functional.