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Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs
- metadat 4y agoCheck out those jobs, Ocaml in Singapore? Intriguing.
- ButterWashed 4y agoIn the DevOps/OnCall role you have to be prepared to deal with "all kinds of software bugs and hardware deviations on a daily basis" which doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs.
- nijave 4y ago"24/7"
- altdataseller 4y agoTheir codebase and infrastructure is a huge gobbled mess, according to someone i know who worked there. Dont be seduced by a mention of Ocaml.
- quickthrower2 4y agoJust like Jane Street
- slater 4y agoActually surprised at the lack of usual "(search results may also come from bing/google/yandex)"
- daolf 4y agoYup, they build everything and it costed them $60m. That’s an impressive bet. And without funding! https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/amp/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmZyLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAK1nqpzzdrnQIarJag8sEAKMCJH3YLptZ2e4BGvcbqtofNFPaCc20lYP6uWxEmv-e1I_YpAOh2Ni2TTT93WBAW7r9muZOliPehNgk5OMcjAWoPp5HdV_G0j6Axn5izKmv-ZWcvfqAkK_0GXMDzmH7NevsmXzqcHUJZ_082dPT2pX https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/amp/?guc...
- slater 4y agodownside: doesn't seem to care much for boolean ("-keyword") search terms, instead opting for the modern thing of "let's actually search for that keyword, too!" v______v
- botsbreeder 4y agoNo boolean search yet.
- throwaway2016a 4y agoI wonder if they are including in that the money they already invested in the Ahrefs SEO tools. It seems to me that their SEO tools were already crawling a lot of content so this may be an extension of that / a new way to monetize the data. I personally know a lot of people who pay for their SEO tools so I imagine they have a decent amount of revenue.
- botsbreeder 4y agoThere is a lot of intersection between Ahrefs tools and search. We were collecting web data for Ahrefs tools for 12 years, now we repurpose these data for Yep.
- botsbreeder 4y agoWe do indexing ourselves and don't use any third-party APIs.
- andrewstuart 4y agoMaybe this will be the thing that works.
- Gualdrapo 4y agoBummer 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.
- botsbreeder 4y agoImage search is coming. We have it working but it is not fast enough yet.
- wumpus 4y agoIt took bing years to get the porn out of its image search.
- readams 4y agoHmm I don't get any results for any searches... "No results found for test"
- shannifin 4y agoYeah, it seemed to glitch out temporarily... maybe too much traffic already?
- gnabgib 4y agoCan 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?](https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-did-google-fail-to-build-a-non-evil-platform-3a054f996ea9 https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...)
- thyrox 4y agoAhrefs is the biggest reason why Google results are so bad nowadays. 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). I hope they are ready to face the seo monster they have created and yep can't be gamed as easily.
- a13n 4y agoIt’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though. Google is the reason the incentive exists in the first place, no?
- HWR_14 4y ago> It’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though Why not? And they didn't solve the problem, they exploited the problem.
- judge2020 4y agoIt seems the websites with the most poor-quality, ad-filled, possibly incorrect information are the ones trying to game the system the most. If you're someone who just has a blog or website and is focused on the content, this turns ahrefs into a 'cartel' you must pay into if you want your own SEO to be on the same par as those spending all their time on seo optimization.
- glenngillen 4y agoI worked for a company in the SEO space a bit over a decade ago, initially to try and learn the things you call out above. My surprise at the time was to discover most of the snake oil being sold as “SEO” was nothing more than basic usability 101 stuff. Make sure titles are descriptive. Try to use terms that your readers would use and recognise to ensure the content resonates. Structure your content in a sensible way with clear headings. It’s almost like Google were trying to turn a human experience into an algorithm! ;) There was obviously a bunch of black hat stuff too but the efficacy of that was generally pretty short lived and the techniques tightly held. The whole SEO industry seemed to be in on the joke that you only spoke about those techniques or provided training on them after they stopped working. Something seems to have changed since that time though. I don’t think it’s Ahrefs because there were similar services long before them. Did Google lose their way and stop trying to quantify a human experience? I had my concerns back then when they introduced the concept of a canonical URL for duplicate content, something that’s implemented in a way to only be useful for a bot and not a person. But I’ve been too distant to these things to know if it was an isolated example or the beginning of a trend. Did the cat and mouse game of improving usability come to a plateau and now we’re in the inevitable end game of exploiting edge cases and 2% improvements? Is this what should have been the completely predictable state we’d end up given the alignment of incentives? Search results that are _just_ good enough so that you don’t abandon Google, but not so good that you click a result instead of an ad. I don’t know what the cause is, or if it’s even just one thing. But it definitely feels like it’s been getting progressively worse for a long time and that the rate of decline has been accelerating. To that end I’ve personally switched to Kagi. It’s at least ticked the “just good enough” box for me for a few months, which is something that never stuck with DDG. And so I fronted the cash for an annual subscription incase the incentive system with Google was part of the problem. I figure me moaning about it while still active using it means I’m complicit in being part of the problem too. And so I should vote with both my feet and dollars in support of any team that’s actually trying to fix things.
- shannifin 4y agoSounds 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?
- kevinh 4y agoThe profit share section (https://yep.com/profit-share https://yep.com/profit-share) doesn't have any details as to how it works, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
- hackernewds 4y agoHow is this even supposed to function? It's as if Grubhub went and said they're now doing delivery from every single restaurant in the US
- fastball 4y agoHaven't there been delivery startups that do that?
- st34m 4y agoIt would work like any other 3rd party website verification, e.g. some of these options that Google uses for their webmaster tools: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080?hl=en#choose_method https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080?hl=en#c... Uploading a file that contains a token and then serving that file at a specified URL is common. So, you'd need to go and claim the money that yep.com is apparently going to keep track of for each site or subdomain.
- wumpus 4y agoGrubhub made a fake website for every restaurant in the US...
- botsbreeder 4y ago
- ffhhj 4y agoFound a bug, where is my bounty? https://yep.com/web?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com https://yep.com/web?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com
- simple10 4y agoFrom 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. "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." [1] https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-did-google-fail-to-build-a-non-evil-platform-3a054f996ea9 https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di... 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.
- Teandw 4y ago
- rafram 4y agoAs with most supposed Google killers, it suffers from the small issue of being terrible. 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": - 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. - 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).
- gruez 4y ago>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": I remember I was in school they'd teach you how to formulate search queries. You wouldn't ask questions like "how to bake a cookie", you'd use keywords like "cookie recipe". Search engines have progressed much since those days, such that you can ask questions and it would mostly know what you were looking for, but obviously a less sophisticated search engine can't do that?
- lelandfe 4y agoI’d encourage all those who believe this is just a keyword issue to try to find a search on Yep that produces film stores in LA. I just tried like 10 incantations to no avail “Film store in los angeles” gives me DVD stores on yellowpages.com as the 3rd result…
- gruez 4y agoTo be honest I'm not even quite sure what you mean when you say "film stores". It could mean stores that sell photographic film, or stores that sell movies. Presumably you mean the former, but I certainly wouldn't call stores that sell film as "film stores". They'd most likely be photography stores or maybe at big box/department/pharmacies. In that respect, asking for "film stores" is like asking for "bacon stores".
- 4y ago
- freitasm 4y agoFrom their About Yep page: "We built Yep from the ground up so that we can give 90% of ad revenue to content creators." And yet there is nowhere around the site explaining how creators can claim that "revenue".
- cebu 4y agoThink SEO spam is a problem now? Wait until "creators" are paid per their SERP
- botsbreeder 4y agoWe start from the hard problem - search itself. When we are happy with a search results we will add ads and revenue share. There is no revenue to share at the moment.
- dubswithus 4y agoI'd like to invest. Are they raising?
- judge2020 4y ago> According to Tech in Asia, Ahrefs annual revenue as of July 2021 was about $100 million. https://ain.capital/2021/08/30/ahrefs-creates-a-search-engine/ https://ain.capital/2021/08/30/ahrefs-creates-a-search-engin...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SahAssar 4y agoI don't trust Ahrefs at all. The whole SEO industry is tainted, and Ahrefs is not a good part of it. 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 https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ but I would like to see some more competition.
- hackernewds 4y agoexactly. as a consumer, I want to find good content. if the content is good there will be monetization prospects at the destination vs at the source doing this at scale makes it an economically viable as well as pleasant interface which Google does quite well already
- nacs 4y agoThis needs to be higher up. If you go to the about section of Yep.com, you can see this is powered by the "Ahrefs" bot (not just for sourcing crawler data but also run by the same people). Ahrefs is a sleazy "SEO tool" ( https://ahrefs.com/pricing https://ahrefs.com/pricing ) that basically exists to exploit weaknesses in search engine algorithms and other shady things (and make lots of money doing it -- $99/mo to $999/mo).
- fooey 4y agoThis whole yep.com thing feels like an attempt to get everyone to please stop blocking their bot
- blinding-streak 4y ago100% this right here. Ahrefs and Yep is not some altruistic endeavor.
- moneywoes 4y agoDumb question but would they not rotate bots in a situation like this? Or do they have a specific crawler
- bitwize 4y agoI'm reminded of a character from Wreck-it Ralph 2, a coolhunting algorithm called Yesss.
- Method-X 4y agoI love how there are now many little search engines trying to differentiate themselves from Google. A few others worth checking out are: 1. https://search.brave.com https://search.brave.com (they use their own index / my personal favourite) 2. https://kagi.com https://kagi.com 3. https://neeva.com https://neeva.com
- paulcole 4y agoThis Yep thing isn’t a search engine. It’s a content-marketing campaign for Ahrefs. They don’t want to compete with Google. They want press for themselves.
- Method-X 4y agoThose two goals are not mutually exclusive.
- Teandw 4y agoThat shows you have a distinct lack of understanding of what Ahref's core business model is built upon. It's not a PR stunt and they don't want to directly compete with Google either. They want it for search data. They don't need to be anything near Google's size to make it worthwhile.
- ecommerceguy 4y agoAHREFS has 2 things going for it: 1. a freaking giant crawled index, 2. a freaking giant pile of metadata on google search rankings.
- danskeren 4y agoI'd like to throw mine into the mix (we're a non-profit that plans to donate 80% of our profits to other non-profit organizations and charities, but we need more traffic before Google will enable ads, so at the moment then we're ad-free and not generating any income to donate): https://ask.moe https://ask.moe
- hetspookjee 4y ago
- pluc 4y agoDoesn't render anything without Javascript. You know who does? Google.
- camkego 4y agoThis raises an interesting question. Presumably you are referring to search results on a browser where JS/Ecmascript is disabled. Another interesting place where Ecmascript comes into play is the pages that have been scraped. One difference between search engines is how they handle SPAs, and 100% Ecmascript rendered pages from frameworks like React. I wonder if they execute JS in order to build good search results from pages that are React style SPAs.
- botsbreeder 4y agoAhrefsBot execute JS on small percent of pages from 2017 https://ahrefs.com/blog/crawling-javascript/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/crawling-javascript/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- latchkey 4y agoOur 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. Company is based in Singapore, but where are the servers? No way you're hosting 2k servers there, the costs are just too high.
- botsbreeder 4y agoFresh numbers are: 3115 servers 330K CPU cores 2.3PB RAM 50PB HDD 182PB SSD most of it is in Singapore
- endisneigh 4y agoIf Google Contributor didn’t work, why will this?
- snarkypixel 4y agoKind of ironic that they're hosting their "Story behind Yep" on medium which has many privacy issues
- mdaniel 4y agoSomeone once submitted a link here that used scribe.rip and I've had good luck replacing any medium-ish url (they're easy to spot via the "@" or the trailing hexadecimal hash in the URL) with scribe.rip: https://scribe.rip/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-did-google-fail-to-build-a-non-evil-platform-3a054f996ea9 https://scribe.rip/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...
- freediver 4y agoLet'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. 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. 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). The idea sounds noble on paper but it seems that math does not check. Missing something?
- viraptor 4y agoPages are not created equal and averaging numbers here seems to be of little use. In practice the popularity is likely closer to some exponential-like distribution. Similar to music streaming services. Lots of people wouldn't get anything but they probably don't expect anything either.
- freediver 4y agoI was using averages because this model is supposed to help the "average creator", those left behind in the current Google-economy model. "Whales" and "superwhales" (which is what as you correctly conclude this model would probably converge to too) already exist in Google-economy world so not really interesting to observe. They would just make the average creator make even less. This person for example (from their article) "Say, you love pancakes more than anything else in the world. Imagine getting paid to share creative recipes, take photos and instruct website visitors on how they too can make amazing pancakes." Would make $3/month (+- order of magnitude) if Yep was ever to achieve DDG level of success.
- fastball 4y agoYou put "average creator" in quotes but from my reading of their site Yep has not claimed they will help the "average creator", just "creators". If Yep shares a higher percentage of revenue with creators than Google, surely that is helping creators even if it doesn't mean you're achieving some sort of imaginary "no man left behind" standard for the average creator.
- enterexit 4y agoNitpick: Google Search alternative
- chrismarlow9 4y agoThis 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. You'd make far more converting your content to a podcast or YouTube channel and using affiliate product placement. Anything else becomes a cat and mouse game with ad blockers.
- altdataseller 4y agoThis is Squidoo and HubPages reincarnated. Both failed, nothing new
- quickthrower2 4y agoBiting the hand that feeds
- jstummbillig 4y agoConsidering how much HN loves to complain about Google, they sure also love to tear holes into not Google.
- cj 4y agoIf HN existed when Google was founded, I'm sure we would have torn Larry and Sergey apart too. People rarely comment online when they like something. People with opposing or differing opinions tend to be over represented since the same people are more likely to be vocal about their feelings.
- necovek 4y agoI am pretty sure majority of the HN crowd was largely supportive of Google when it was founded. But it was a different Google back then: pure no-ads search results (and remember, this was the time of banner ads and paid search placement). Heck, I wore a Google t-shirt I got from them proudly, and recommended all my non-techie friends and family switch to it from Yahoo and Altavista and whatnot. It was only a few years down the line that, relying on word of mouth recommendations from geeks up to that point, they started considering ads as the business model.
- richardsocher 4y agoTruth.
- marban 4y agoAnother one for business news: https://yup.is https://yup.is
- puranjay 4y agoThis comment thread is wild
- DeathArrow 4y agoI would be interested in a search engine which is optimized for users, not for creators or advertisers.
- necovek 4y agoI guess a paid-for search engine like Kagi is what you should be looking at. Results it gives are pretty good, and the incentives are aligned (they earn money from users).
- jamesfisher 4y agoWhy are all Google Search alternatives founded on gimmicks? Where is the startup with a straightforward pitch like "better results than Google, $5/mo"?
- g_p 4y agoThe closest I have seen to what you're describing is https://kagi.com https://kagi.com, which seems to have just gone to open beta. A few commenters have mentioned it in this thread.
- popcorncowboy 4y agoWait, what? Ahrefs should know better than anyone that this is insane. Imagine explaining to the current SEO industry that Google would now be paying 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. I feel like I'm missing the trick here.
- krm01 4y agoThe business model isn’t really the problem with Google. It’s the quality of search results. Which after one simple search on Yep, seems to still be 100X better. Don’t focus on a better business model. Build a better product first.
- account42 4y agoThe business model is not entirely unrelated to the quality of the search results. Anything ad-funded will always have incentives not to get you to the best non-paid result as fast as possible. And once the ad-funded search gets big enough they are likely also going to be doing the middle man part of the ads operation and selling that service to others - which then provides further incentives to not negatively rank ad-heavy sites.
- richardsocher 4y agoAgreed! That's what we're doing at you.com but got a lot of crap for not having fixed the business model. Guess you can't make everybody happy.
- SyneRyder 4y agoI 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: * 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. * 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 out from my own blog. * Pure spam results, like random casino websites in the middle of search results. Or is that Yep's business model? * Entirely random results. Not idea why the Fox homepage would show up on an ego-search for myself. But Yep's results were better than what I got with Brave Search, so they might still be onto something.
- Mortiffer 4y agoJesus 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? 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. 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.
- weinzierl 4y agoThere was a time when for every new search engine that came out after about my first five searches, I was like: Nah, that isn't gonna cut it. 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. 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. 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. [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... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040833
- rambojazz 4y agoSearched for "boobs", got 0 results. Instead it shows me results for "books". Another tool that tries to be smart.
- cynusx 4y agoCompeting heads-on with Google makes no sense; They already nailed the product on desktop and they are decades ahead in R&D. At most you can attack it from a niche like voice-activated search, video search, Smart TV searches or car-searches. 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.
- rg111 4y agoGoogle search gives me mostly shit results now. I have now completely switched to Kagi and code.you.com. I barely use Google now.
- thesunkid 4y agojust curious why don't you use you.com for both regular search and code search?
- rg111 4y agoI use code search in You just for the layout and the variety of resources I see. On the other hand, Kagi can show me better results that are better than Google. You often includes many results in Google search results. Kagi has results that don't appear on DDG, Google, or You. I checked several times. After the launch of their FF extension, I made Kagi the default search engine for everything related to work and work-related-play. I also use Kagi as the default on my phone for some months. I use You Code because of the layout, honestly.
- SynAck6 4y agoIt keeps mentioning that it shares a 90/10 ratio with creators but I'm not entirely sure who the creators are supposed to be.
- NiceWayToDoIT 4y agoMaybe 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? ...
- vdddv 4y agoI don't see how I can register as a creator or claim any revenue. Is that missing from their page or hidden anywhere?
- jarek83 4y agoThe "Why is this good for search?" paragraph here https://yep.com/profit-share https://yep.com/profit-share 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.
- may4m 4y agothe results don't look right here https://ibb.co/4TMvcnQ https://ibb.co/4TMvcnQ
- georgehill 4y agoSeems like they have to do a lot of work to increase the relevance of the search results. Query "ahrefs founder name" Yep: https://yep.com/web?q=ahrefs+founder+name https://yep.com/web?q=ahrefs+founder+name Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=ahrefs+founder+name https://www.google.com/search?q=ahrefs+founder+name 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
- tasn 4y agoFunny enough, searching for "Google" doesn't return google.com, at least not on the first page.
- spelledwrong 4y agoyep.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 (https://fairsearch.com/fairbot https://fairsearch.com/fairbot and https://yep.com/yepbot https://yep.com/yepbot).
- Seirdy 4y agoYep is the official engine; FairSearch was the "pre-release" version.