Popular SEO tools business Ahrefs has spent $60 million on data centers for a new search engine named ‘Yep,’ which may compete directly with Google, Bing, and Yandex.
For the past 12 years, Ahrefs has been scanning and storing data on the web and has created a web crawler called AhrefsBot that scans over eight billion websites every 24 hours.
When it is released, Ahrefs’ search engine will be available in all nations and in the majority of languages as the firm prepares to service the massive amount of data that will be created. In addition, the business intends to share 90 percent of search engine advertising income with content authors.
Ahrefs also announced the opening of its first data center in Singapore, with over 1,000 computers storing and processing 100 petabytes of online data as part of its search architecture for a new search engine, as well as plans to construct a data center in the United States by the end of 2022.
Dmytro Gerasymenko, the founder and CEO of Ahrefs, revealed intentions in 2019 to establish an alternative search engine that will split 90 percent of advertising income with publishers.
Dmytro Gerasymenko, who serves the role of CEO and Founder of Ahrefs, had the following to say:
Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work. We saw how YouTube’s profit-sharing model made the whole video-making industry thrive. Splitting advertising profits 90/10 with content authors, we want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry. In other words, we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way. For example, we will track how many times a word is searched for and the position of the link getting the most clicks. But we won’t create your profile for targeted advertising.
SEO tool Ahrefs invests $60M in building creator-friendly search engine, ‘Yep’ https://t.co/AwgKkzRm9V by @Haje
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) June 3, 2022
The company also confirmed that the new search engine (which is still in the works) will not collect users’ personal information by default, such as geolocation, name, age, sex, preferences, and so on, but will instead collect aggregated search statistics in order to improve algorithms, spelling corrections, and search suggestions.
