221–229 of 229 posts
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 ( https://fairsearch.com/fairbot and https://yep.com/yepbot ).
The 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.
Considering how much HN loves to complain about Google, they sure also love to tear holes into not Google.
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When conversation between two humans derails, I always remember The Egg: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
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Can you please breaking the site guidelines like this? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. Therefore we end up having to ban accounts that keep doing this. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit…
Edit: Just got your email. I will continue the conversation there.
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This 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 ) 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).
Folks here have a really strange view of SEO. These days it's really following guidelines, creating content that people want to see and is useful to searchers, linking to sources, etc.
I 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 (they use their own index / my personal favourite) 2. https://kagi.com 3. https://neeva.com
I'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
The 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.
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Hi, I have a small SEO consultancy. We work with tech companies (mostly B2B saas), many you’ve heard of. 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 do…
There's another side to the coin that I think you're, understandably, overlooking. I don't think either side alone is the full story. It's a big grey ball of tradeoffs, no matter how it all falls. 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 in…
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.