Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#201

Post by rchaud » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #131

SahAssar wrote: post #24

I 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 ht…

It is tainted because the entire premise of "web search" is flawed. IMHO. Sure, one can provide "free web search", and this existed before search engine advertising was a thing, but over time one can see that the concept is flawed. The database being searched is public information. Every web user should have access to it. However, access to a database of public www content is generally not free. An single exception i…

If this were true, the yellow pages would be a best-seller instead of something they waste money mailing to you for free.

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#202

Post by agmater » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

blitzar wrote: post #179

botsbreeder wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AhrefsBot respects robots.txt. Details are here: https://ahrefs.com/robot

My parents say I am a very good boy too.

If you don't believe the CEO you can always just IP block them. In my experience they respect "User-agent: * Disallow: /".

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#203

Post by georgehill » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

Seems 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

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

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#204

Post by tdehnel » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #105

swinnipeg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using ahrefs for years, not sure what is sleazy about it. 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.

SEO itself is sleazy. Any gaming of search is sleazy, whether active or passive. The NSA is sleazy, even though they simply report on "the state of affairs".

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 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.

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#205

Post by rg111 » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

thesunkid wrote: post #181

rg111 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search gives me mostly shit results now. I have now completely switched to Kagi and code.you.com. I barely use Google now.

just curious why don't you use you.com for both regular search and code search?

I 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.

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#206

Post by marginalia_nu » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

necovek wrote: post #150

pete_nic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a large, horizontal platform. My intuition is the next Google killers will be specific to verticals, health comes up on HN a lot. All that to say, if I were yep I would focus on search that avoids big, corporate, SEO stuff and connects users with thoughtful, small creators. I would not focus on commerce eg film, as it’s a crowded vertical full of Google, Shopify, Etsy, and other large e-commerce players.

> small creators That's roughly what search.marginalia.nu does.

Yeah, my goal is to expand to add more verticals in the same rough neighborhood of exploration and discovery.

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.

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#207

Post by bryans » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 7:29 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #196

bryans wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing the context[1] from that quote feels disingenuous, at best, and purporting that they even made any claims about their product is approaching libel. The 2019 personal blog post you're referring to is a general (albeit flawed) analysis of how a Google profit share might work for the top content creators based on guesstimated information from YouTube revenues. They were very clear about all of this and plainly…

I was under the wrong impression that this [1] was the announcement blog post for Yep. As I read the comments here initially, many mentioned that blog post and I did not pay attention to the date on it and just took it for granted. [2] 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 b…

> 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.

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.

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#208

Post by tasn » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

Funny enough, searching for "Google" doesn't return google.com, at least not on the first page.

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#209

Post by spelledwrong » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

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).

Re: Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

#210

Post by mdaniel » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 8:28 PM UTC

snarkypixel wrote: post #60

Kind of ironic that they're hosting their "Story behind Yep" on medium which has many privacy issues

Someone 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-di...