The creators of Ahrefs, one of the most popular SEO tools on the market, already indicated a long time ago that they were working on their own search engine. That search engine is called Yep.com.
As they pointed out last year, one of the radical differences with other search engines such as Google is that Yep will share 90% of its revenue with content creators. Now it remains to be seen if the promise is fulfilled… and if that changes things.
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A promise that could be a threat to Google
Those responsible for Ahrefs they have invested 60 million dollars in creating this “creator-friendly” search engine. The name is certainly curious, and it is likely that they would especially like to go for a short name that is easy to remember and write.
For its creators possibility sharing revenue with content creators – a common industry complaint with Google – is certainly striking, and indeed at Ahrefs they think that can make a difference with the search engine that has dominated everything on the internet for years:
“Let’s say the world’s largest search engine makes $100 billion a year. Now imagine they gave $90 billion to content creators and publishers. Wikipedia would probably make a few billion dollars a year from its content.” They could stop asking for donations and start paying a decent salary to the people who polish their stuff.”
The message may have a lot of idealistic, but it is certainly an interesting idea that will have to deal with another much more real: convince users to use Yep.
To do it, just enter the URL https://yep.com in the address bar of the browser, which will cause the search engine interface to appear along with a couple of links in which its creators talk about how this search engine has been created and also offer jobs to those who are interested in helping to meet the objectives of this project.
As we said, the current business model for content creators is advertising. The traffic from Google is a crucial source of not only user trafficbut also income, since when you visit a website, the advertising displayed on it is what allows that publication to earn money even if they show the content for free.
And Ahrefs they believe that another model is possiblebut of course the idea will be complicated for it to take shape in an industry trapped by the advertising model although little by little the subscription model is proposing a valid alternative for some media, especially large ones.
Some erratic beginnings
In Xataka we have briefly tested the search engine and the truth is that the first impressions make it clear that the search engine is still in a preliminary phase and still has a lot of room for improvement.
This is noticeable in searches such as those carried out with this medium: in Google it appears correctly in the first place, but in Yep the first result corresponds to Xataka TV and not to Xataka, which appears in second with a title of “403 Forbidden” and not just “Xataka”.
When clicking on the link everything works correctly and takes you to the Xataka website, but the order of presentation of the results it’s a bit confusing. The same thing happened, for example, when entering my alias, which normally leads to my personal website.
In Yep, what happened was that the search engine thought that I was looking for information on “wasps”, not on “javipas”. The assumption is excusedbut certainly not entirely convincing.
One of the great features of the Google search engine is that you don’t even have to go to the content creator’s website: the search engine is often capable of show you the information you were looking for “embedded” in the search results.
We wanted to see what would happen with a quick search asking how to make a potato omelette. Google showed links to YouTube videos and below to some additional questions with drop-down answers, while in Yep the operation was that of a much more traditional search enginewith various websites that talk about how to make the potato omelette recipe.
It would be interesting to know how Yep organizes these results and if the company’s own business model —which is dedicated to trying to improve the web positioning of companies— it will not be in the end a contradiction for your browser.
For now, yes, Yep shows those erratic starts typical of a newly launched product. There is no segmented image search for exampleand it is surprising how among the Yep results a special section is shown to redirect that search to Google, Bing, Mojeek and DuckDuckGo.
Yes, there is a section to search for news related to our search terms, but the results they are usually oldso that option is also currently limited in terms of benefits.
It is clear that the search engine is now in full development phase and that everything will improve, so it will be interesting to see how this search engine will evolve and if that unique business model that rewards content creators really delivers on its promise.
