Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs
yep.com
yep.com
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/ but I would like to see some more competition.
doing this at scale makes it an economically viable as well as pleasant interface which Google does quite well already
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 ) 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).
Trying to masquerade as another agent would be considered bad form, but obviously happens a lot.
There's a similar bot, MJ12Bot that powers Majestic's index which is similar to ahrefs. IIRC they have a user agent but their crawling is distributed, it's impossible to verify whether someone with that UA is them or someone else masquerading.
Good practice by bot owners is having a UA and known IPs they crawl from which can be verified by DNS and reverse DNS lookups.
It audits your site for issues, shows Google rankings for keywords, estimated volume for keywords, backlinks to specific sites, backlinks to specific pages...etc.
It doesn't do anything for SEO (no content, no links...etc), it simply reports on the state of affairs.
Google even lists it as a required skill for some of their roles:
https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/83882884131103430-pr...
I don't know if I'd use Google as a great example of sleazy vs non-sleazy...
I’d agree With you if those links were misleading, but they usually aren’t. They really do point to pages with “[something] in [location]”. And they really are helpful for search engines looking to give useful results for that type of query.
Sure.
Sure, people still do that. Doesn’t mean that’s representative for the SEO industry.
Don't blame SEO because capitalism necessitated that businesses use whatever means possible to get their product in front of your face.
You’re right that some approaches to SEO are sleazy. They are a bit old fashioned at this point, and usually result in short term results which crash and burn. Google does actually care if users don’t find a good result; they are working on improving the results every day.
But you’re wrong in the sense that SEO done correctly is just a good way to get in front of potential customers who are actively searching for information by proving value to them up front.
Let’s say you run a company and I tell you customers are searching for your product 1000 times a day. What are you going to do? Not invest in SEO?
So, to demystify it, here’s what we do:
1. Identify topics that people are searching for, prioritize by search volume and conversion potential
2. Create content which is going to best satisfy that person’s search intent. We don’t want them clicking the back button and choosing another result, that would hurt our rankings in the long run
3. Try and link to the new content from other pages on our own site
4. Identify any technical issues which would prevent a search engine crawler from being able to access or understand our content
That’s pretty much it.
Even with just your own description of your activities you can find perverse incentives and negative externalities.
You aren't exactly incentivized to just create content that satisfies common queries. More fully, you're incentivized to create content that makes people think (rightly or wrongly) their query is being answered while also marketing your goods/services to them as much as possible.
Even assuming the best intentions to actually answer the query - be it altruism, discerning searchers, fear of Google, or something else - the content itself is hardly unbiased. This isn't inherently some kind of moral failure on your part, but it's hardly negligible either for the searcher. Everybody is going to have different thresholds here for what crosses the line, but I think it's understandable that some people are just unhappy having to even put in the time and energy to disentangle this aspect in the first place.
And this dovetails into one of the obvious externalities. Who is doing SEO, and who isn't? That totally unaffiliated small-time blogger that just happened to write up a bit of info after having the same problem as you probably isn't doing a whole lot of SEO. At least, they aren't hiring you to help increase their hosting costs. Somebody trying to find less biased views ends up having to wade through all the sites making enough money to pay for SEO first, to actually find what they're looking for. It should be pretty obvious why that does no favors for SEO's reputation.
But as I said at the beginning, you're not wrong either. This stuff goes deep into 'small' questions like profit-motives and competition for limited resources. Obviously and trivially correct answers aren't here.
I really do appreciate that you're approaching this from the much better intentioned side of things. One of the few things that might be obviously correct is that your approach is better than the sleezy way.
But that doesn't make it all rainbows and sunshine either.
Here's the thing: If I don't answer the user's query accurately, another website will. Then they will get all the traffic. So my long term incentive is to satisfy the query.
Within that there is a certain tolerance and understanding among search users that websites can't publish information for free. See Wikipedia constantly begging for money.
So companies (my clients) can justifiably get away with a small amount of self promotion. But if you take that too far you'll just get punished in the SERPs too.
So, it seems Ahrefs describes itself as "SEO Tools..."
These days it's really following guidelines, creating content that people want to see and is useful to searchers, linking to sources, etc.
No-one actually wants to know how the sausage is made.
[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26030703-disrupted
What it does is showing you errors on your page 404, slow urls, pages that link to your site, missing tags, images that are too big and load slowly, keyword research and other things.
I use it even for my small projects (the free version) because it helps me fix broken links or improve the page speed which is all good for users.
An analogous situation is DNS. It is public information. Generally some of the database is made available for free, e.g., https://czds.icann.org/home. In practice many people get the information piecemeal via lookups from a third party via a shared DNS cache, e.g., an ISP DNS cache. However there are other ways to get the information. It is public information. There should not be a restriction, real or imagined, that one has to go through a third party to get it.
A further analogous situation is scans of www ports that check for httpds. If one runs a server that listens for connections on a public network, one should expect that the public may try to connect to it. This again is public information. No one should have to pay for access to it. However, often we see that bulk access is restricted to "security researchers". For example, censys.io will allow the public to search for free, with limits.
The trend I am seeing is that the public is being trained to view the web as something opaque. People pay ISP's to access the web yet they are led to believe there is no way to view what it contains. At least, not for free. The public is led to believe the only way to see what the web contains is to do naive searches through third party that is Hoovering up the data and trying to sell advertising services.
Imagine person A has a list of public information. Person B asks, "May I see the list." Person A says, "Sorry, but I compiled the list and therefore access to it requires a subscription. However I will let you search the list for free." The problem is that Person B will never know what is on the list, even though it is public information. Person B cannot even copy a small portion of the ordered list. IMHO, coupled with the perverse motivation of Person A to collect data and sell advertising services, this makes the concept of "search" flawed. If Person A said, "Sure, have a look at the list. If you need help searching through it, I can provide that service for a fee," then I would not see search as flawed.
In other words, I want to see more work like Common Crawl to share public information. Seeing the list, so to speak, can influence how one chooses to search it, so I want to see the list first. One of the flaws of today's "web search" is that it hides list entries that are not "popular" because non-popular entries have no value to advertisers.
The web seems to be becoming more and more opaque to its users. Like a Yellow Pages where no one can see past the first page. The competition to reach the first page is controlled by a third party "search provider" who can manipulate it to collect data and sell advertising services. However I want to be able to see the first page, the last page and all the pages in between. I want to be able to copy portions of the full list. I want to search a subset of the list without the use of a third party.
It is a strange business to commercialise access to public information.
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?
"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.
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.
Revenue share amount from Youtube is a few times less than what Google search is making https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q1_alphabet_earnings...
Data for this? Rather people love to consume videos. Instagram, Tiktok, Twitch come to mind immediately. Not just Youtube.
Inciting the notion that they're individually responsible for the whole of content creators' income only encourages more ads or even nefarious behavior -- which is completely antithetical to your own company's philosophy, so it's not clear why you're so publicly holding a competitor to a different standard.
"Say Anne from Kentucky helps 4,000 people learn how to build container gardens via her Wordpress blog every month. She would receive $1,000 monthly from the search engine in return."
To me this sounds like the idea of this model is to allow an average person doing casual blogging to make significant income? Given this premise, can we make it work?
To be clear I absolutely love the idea, I think it sounds fair and in the spirit of the web that I would like to see. The web needs innovative ideas like this, unfortunately I do not see this concrete one being viable.
Who pays? With money coming from where?
And how bad will SEO efforts become to get their hands on that kind of money, which is 10 times (not 1,000 times, my mistake) more than that same blog would make with advertising, if we considered a CPM rate of $ 25 ?
Here is the actual portion from that post:
"YouTube’s revenue [...] can approximate that top-earners receive $0.0015 for every one view. Considering how much more ad revenue Google SEPR[sic] clicks generate in comparison to YouTube views, a Google profit-share model could generate significantly higher returns for top content creators. Based on a quick analysis, serving one search could pay an average rate from $0.05 to $0.25 in the US. Say Anne from Kentucky helps 4,000 people learn how to build container gardens via her Wordpress blog every month. She would receive $1,000 monthly from the search engine in return."
Given the context, you're putting many words in their mouth. It wasn't a product announcement, the product itself didn't even exist yet, they didn't actually claim a $0.25/query profit or even make any claims at all, they never made any mention whatsoever about being a substantial revenue source for "average" creators (who don't make substantial revenue to begin with), and they weren't even talking about their own product.
So, again, you're holding them to an impossible standard of revenue to meet your arbitrary and unreasonable qualifications of being "impactful." It comes across as ethical posturing, and shaming someone for napkin math about a different company's offering in an old "I have an idea" post just doesn't seem appropriate from a competitor in the space. I can only presume that you wouldn't be a fan of people nitpicking quotes from your old posts, so I'm not sure why you're doing it to someone else.
[1] https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...
Edit: In fact, the other person who replied to your comment just proved that what you're doing is completely irresponsible and libelous. You're sowing the idea that those two sentences were in reference to the company's actual offering, which is completely false, but you're actively convincing people otherwise.
Edit: Here's a screenshot[2] of your unedited comment, since you decided to remove false information and things that I referenced.
It seems that the 'announcement' post I was referring to isn't fresh announcement for Yep but a 2019 blog post by the founder explaining the concept.
In any case my math was meant to be a critique of the proposed model, not any particular product, and I still stand by that analysis. There was no malice intended.
Thanks for holding me accountable.
[1] https://medium.com/swlh/investor-money-vs-public-interest-di...
Except that your conclusion was to declare that search ad revenue is "not much" money, which is both plainly false and extremely strange for you to say, given that the entire premise of your own search engine is to take ad revenue out of the equation because the company profits and personal costs of ads to the end user are too high. So, I'm really not sure why you would stand behind an analysis that hundreds of millions of dollars is an "unviable" and irrelevant amount of revenue.
When Kagi is bringing in $365M/year, feel free to make all the declarations you want about $328M being "not much." Until then, you're being hypercritical for no apparent reason -- with the results being identical to malice.
My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check.
The reason I say that is because math does not care about my feelings, what you or I want or what the idea suggests. It has to work.
If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed. It is a terrible idea.
Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.
Please quote me, because I never put any words in your mouth, and accusing me of doing so is brazenly false and escalatory.
> and starting to get personal at the same time.
Bringing attention to the hypocrisy of your baseless claims is not a personal attack, particularly when the only question raised was your own company's status and publicly stated philosophy about the industry being directly discussed. You are not a victim in this situation.
> My conclusion was that the idea of profit share sounds good on paper but the math does not check.
This is the exact claim that you just accused me of "putting in your mouth," so you're doubling down on your completely faulty analysis, while also claiming I've somehow antagonized you into doing so.
> If Kagi had $300M /year extra, and shared that money with 10M websites, that would be $30 /year or less than $3/month to a website owner. In my opinion that is not how you make impact
As folks in this thread have explained to you multiple times, there is no such thing as an even distribution of traffic. In reality, the content creators who currently get very little search traffic won't be affected by this additional revenue source, but they aren't expecting to and nobody is claiming that they will. Whereas a content creator who does receive a lot of search traffic would see an increase of revenue that is significant relative to their overall income.
You are still trying to push these fundamentally absurd notions that all content creators have the same sized audiences and that the search engine should be responsible for their baseline revenue -- and if the company doesn't meet those literally impossible requirements that no other business in the world would ever be held to, then the concept is somehow inherently flawed and won't have any relevant impact.
> and the cost of distributing this money would be more than what is being distributed.
You're inventing problems that don't exist. The advertising and content industries have utilized minimum payouts for decades. The claims process could be as simple as a site verification code, which has also been used for decades by thousands of companies.
> It is a terrible idea. Now what can make impact is you take $300M and invest in something that can scale.
This explains everything about your commentary, and I find it to be anti-social at its very core. You appear to be plainly declaring that money can only be impactful when invested in large businesses that "scale" -- scale at what, nobody knows, but apparently scaling is inherently beneficial to society in some way -- and that supporting small businesses is a "terrible idea." That is illogical, harmful and completely unjustifiable.
Presuming your DDG example of 100M/day @ $0.01, that would be $328M/year paid out to creators. Bandcamp currently pays out ~$75M annually, and nobody is declaring them "unviable." So, I can't imagine why you consider this amount to be "not much," particularly when it would be additional revenue for creators which is typically 100% absorbed by the search provider.
The profit is too low. And they're not saying they're going to provide a living wage, just an extra revenue stream. Just because that revenue stream isn't enough by itself to live on doesn't take away that it's a revenue stream and people who are indie hacking need to generate multiple revenue streams to provide security for themselves.
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.
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.
At the article level, it is indeed mostly harmless, except when they catch some Google bias such as removing dates and edit notices from blog posts (because evergreen articles supposedly rank better), force a certain word count, H1/H2 count and paragraph size (which is why you get a life story before a recipe), or when it teaches you to disguise keyword stuffing and you get articles with semi-nonsensical paragraphs that can rank high. This is mostly annoying, though.
But IMO the biggest problem is SEO at a strategic level, which is what's done with the help of tools like Moz and Ahrefs. Websites often hire content agencies to make a large number of low-quality articles targeting popular searches that don't show too many results yet. Basically "balancing" demand/supply. But this practice puts non-SEO-optimized results at the bottom and replaces them with low-quality articles written by freelancers. This forces non-commercial publishers into bigger websites (like StackOverflow, Quora or Reddit). It also causes a lot of duplicate content, since those content agencies uses existing content from results as the basis for their own articles, only SEO optimized. The articles are of course rewritten so it's not word-by-word plagiarism. They also help evading Google measures to fix results. The latest trend when I was still in the industry was having unrelated companies helping each other do inorganic link-building by putting random links in more popular websites also controlled by those agencies, but that's probably old stuff by now.
The biggest problem was feeling like a bad human and not wanting to tell my friends about how I made money on my side hustle. I am really glad I sold those sites and left SEO behind.
My side hustle now is writing FOSS.
Another one for products is having the same category named with 2000 related titles so it shows up for the exact search terms someone is searching even if they aren’t quite accurate to the category.
1. Think of some product niche: say, best dog toys.
2. Google it.
3. Click on the top 5 search results.
4. Now, judge for yourself: Are these good quality links which look like they were written by a smart human who simply bought a bunch of dog toys and tested them, and is speaking from their personal experience? OR, are the search results gamified to hell, and clearly not something any normal person would think to write by themselves?
I think it's clear in 2022: you have to write in an artificial style and make a lot of unintuitive choices to rank on Google, which is to say, to have anyone online be aware of and using your website. You also have to compete against giant incumbents now who will crush you if you don't come educated and ready to rank against them. So you no choice but to learn SEO techniques, really.
Note: I'm not an SEO guy, I make $0 off SEO. I'm an independent developer who's concluded, if I want to make any money off my own websites, I can learn SEO or I can be poor. And I don't enjoy being poor. So there's not really much of a choice imho, at this point in the timeline.
Why not? And they didn't solve the problem, they exploited the problem.
Seems a little harsh. People would be trying to game the search results with or without the metrics.
They're just selling a shovel though. The ad industry and its money is the root cause behind the gold rush, not the shovel seller.
The only solution is to try to build a new system that can’t be abused.
I think there is something to be said of the ethics of participating in some markets.
Deception only has legitimate purposes insofar as "the ends justify the means," and they never do in this instance.
"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-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.
* 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.
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).
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?
“Film store in los angeles” gives me DVD stores on yellowpages.com as the 3rd result…
At this point anyone who will even try to build a search engine will have my backing because God this world deserves another search engine.
You'll be happy to hear that Yep selects neither for top positions: https://yep.com/web?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all get this perfectly right.
Other searches are much worse.
"los angeles, where to purchase roll of film" top 3 results: https://i.imgur.com/UxEXD0N.png
1. The movie Battle: Los Angeles on Vudu
2. A fake viagra spam with "la" in the domain
3. The LA muncipality definition of an "Unincorporated Area"
https://www.google.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://yep.com/web?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://neeva.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://search.brave.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles
and
"Photography store Los Angeles"
Both pulled up full pages of results wkth just websites of stores that sell film.
Your search-fu is atrophied, if it ever was any good.
Non-ML heavy search engines search for identical text on the page. So if you want a store that sells film, you need a keyword combination that would appear on their website; not a vague question or request to a mystical search AI.
> if you want a store that sells film, you need a keyword combination that would appear on their website; not a vague question
Do you suspect "camera stores" in Los Angeles include neither the words "film" nor "Los Angeles" on their sites?
All my keywords are found in every first page Google result (" Top 10 Best Film Camera Store in Los Angeles").
https://yep.com/web?q=Camera+store+in+Los+Angeles
Pick the first result.
It's https://www.camphotobur.com/
Which is, admittedly, in Burbank.
2. It doesn't matter, because not everybody will and it's easier to make a better product than educate and change the habits of the world.
(Especially when it's now okay to do both on some search engines, but only one option on others, with no instruction manual on which is which)
That's roughly what search.marginalia.nu does.
At least in the intermediate term, I don't think it's possible to create an "everything"-offering like Google's. I also don't know if that is desirable either, at least not if the goal is to encourage a sense of agency on the Internet.
But in general terms both Google and Duckduckgo seem to be broken and they give almost the same results for most other queries. Which has become universally bad in a lot of cases. With either SEO spammed sites on top or just the wrong results shown, with the search engine ignoring words in the query. Hopefully these alternatives find a solution to that so that atleast non-local search improves.
The search space is really broken. So as long as a search engine can actually search even if it cannot do local to begin with, would be a great start.
* a Yelp page with the title "Top 10 Best 35mm Film in Los Angeles, CA", which seems to have the results you're looking for
* A reddit discussion where someone asks the exact same question, and gets some seemingly OK answers
The rest of the results are a mix of film rentals, film school, instructions on how to get a filming permit, etc.
In Google, if I put my suburb in, I get the Wikipedia page for the suburb, a map showing local places, the local high school website, etc.
In Yep, the only results are for my suburb's namesake in Ohio.
So, the search engine from an SEO company is actually showing results from industries that are highly SEO optimized. (Movies, Jobs, Travel are all huge SEO consumers).
And yet there is nowhere around the site explaining how creators can claim that "revenue".
A few others worth checking out are:
1. https://search.brave.com (they use their own index / my personal favourite)
They want it for search data. They don't need to be anything near Google's size to make it worthwhile.
How can a non-profit make profit to share? Don’t you mean the income?
Consumers don't need another monetization model exploiting their web search.
They need a distinct web index/crawler infrastructure that bypasses SEO.
It's not monetized but it's also only costing me less than $50 a month in hosting and cloudflare costs to support.
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.
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.
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.
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]
Query "ahrefs founder name"
Yep: https://yep.com/web?q=ahrefs+founder+name
Google: 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
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.
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.
I feel like I'm missing the trick here.
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.
Results it gives are pretty good, and the incentives are aligned (they earn money from users).
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.
"No results found for test"
That's a way to say there was an error. There shouldn't be, search that on Google.
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.
I have now completely switched to Kagi and code.you.com.
I barely use Google now.
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.
That’s an impressive bet. And without funding!
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/amp/?guc...
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.
https://ain.capital/2021/08/30/ahrefs-creates-a-search-engin...