Ahrefs Launches a Search Engine

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I am Michael Costin and he is Arthur Fabik.

ARTHUR: That was pretty cool. Yeah. So we decided to use our surnames.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you guys know who we actually are.

ARTHUR: So you can do a quick Google search and find us.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Be careful what you wish for when Googling Arthur Fabik. That's all I'm going to say. But anyway, maybe you shouldn't Google it. Maybe you should yep it. Doesn't quite work, does it?

ARTHUR: But that's what we're talking about, right? Yeah, today we're talking about Ahrefs' new search engine, Yep.com.

MICHAEL: So for those of you that don't know, if you haven't listened to any of our previous episodes, you wouldn't have heard of Ahrefs probably, but we do talk about it a lot on the show. It's an SEO software tool. They, for some reason, have invested 60 million big ones of their own money into launching a search engine called Yep. Is it going to work? Well, that's what we're going to get into, at least our thoughts on it. So, yeah, look, Ahrefs, they're probably, as far as business goes to try and create a search engine, they're pretty uniquely placed in that they already have a robot going out there, crawling the web and building a massive index of websites. So like, I think they're the second biggest.

ARTHUR: Yeah. They, so Ahrefs bot, which is their version of, I guess, Google bot, visits more than 8 billion web pages every 24 hours. There you go. And they claim that they claim themselves that the second most active crawler on the web behind Google.

MICHAEL: So they've got, they're out there, they're finding all these pages. That's one thing. They've got an index of it all. That's another, but building a whole search engine to sit on the front end with like the algorithms that go into it and returning relevant search results is a whole other thing. And then on top of that, in the future, building like an ad platform to, So if ads on that search engine is a whole other thing. So it's, you know, they've, they've bitten something quite large off.

ARTHUR: Would they even want to run ads on the app?

MICHAEL: Well, this is what, let's get into the model, I guess, because I'm, I'm a bit confused on how it's actually going to work, but in terms of, I guess, what makes it different, right? Cause there's so many, There's Google, which dominates. Then there's Bing who have been plugging away for years and like managed to get like 2% market shares. It's a bit high. Yeah. We might be harsh on Bing, but like, see, the thing is they might have 5% because they force people to use it on, they force sort of, Let's just say technological, less savvy people.

ARTHUR: So people like my mom, who will get a new laptop with Windows installed, will be using Bing as the default search engine, basically because it's built into Microsoft Edge, which is the default browser. And unless they want to change that browser, which my mom won't, she'll be using Bing without even realizing that it's not Google.

MICHAEL: And does she go to Bing and then type in Google?

ARTHUR: No, well, to be honest- That's the number one search on Bing. I've not asked her that nor have I ever watched her search for anything, but my assumption is that she would be the type of person that would just use whatever's built in and use whatever search engine pops up, so yeah.

MICHAEL: Okay, well, so that's, you know, Microsoft with all its billions and all of its resources to be able to force Bing on people through, you know, web browsers on their operating systems. is still only able to get a few percent. And then there's all these other search engines, you know, like the DuckDuckGo's of the world and the privacy focused ones.

ARTHUR: Which just signed an agreement with Microsoft.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So like, we're all about privacy until we're not. But, um, you know, they've been struggling away for ages. So, you know, Yep is coming from scratch, trying to compete with all of that. Right. So what's their angle?

ARTHUR: Well, two things based on what they say themselves. The first one being privacy. So they claim they will not collect any of your personal information. So stuff that Google collects, such as geolocation, demographical data, such as your age and gender, they don't look at any of that at all. So what it does is basically when you do a search on Yelp, it will rely on whatever keyword that you're searching. And then it looks at the entered keyword, your language preferences, and then it returns a result based on your geographic IP.

MICHAEL: Right. That's what they say. Yes. So that's one angle. So I guess privacy. Is that powerful enough to get people moving over from Google?

ARTHUR: Well, DuckDuckGo did it for many, many years until they sold out to Microsoft. Yeah. Short answer, probably no. It's not enough, I think, to get people wanting to use. Although there are people that are more and more kind of conscious about privacy, but that is still just a very, very small percentage of people. And I've used DuckDuckGo in the past. I think I'm pretty sure they used Bing. So the results were the same as Bing results, just without the tracking. But I find Bing results not as good as Google.

MICHAEL: No. Well, for a long time there, Bing was just copying Google. I think Google threw out a few, um, what are we going to call them? Like Easter eggs or gotchas where they, they put things into their search results that then being replicated so that they could catch them copying them. Really. Yeah. Yeah. So that's funny. Yeah. But, um, look, so let's say privacy, that's not going to get people changing from Google in droves. No. What's the other big part of yup.

ARTHUR: Well, I guess the more interesting, um, use cases, profit sharing. So I guess the plan they have kind of rolled out is that, um, 90% of whatever profit they make, we'll get back to the people actually create content. So the publishers, um, which I think is interesting, that could be enough. I don't know. Do you reckon it could be enough to force people to want to use it?

MICHAEL: Well, the content creators. Yeah. Yeah. People don't care. No, I don't care if, well, first and foremost, how the hell are they paying content creators? 90%. Like let's say there's a search result.

ARTHUR: They're going to be making money first.

MICHAEL: Yeah. First I gotta be making money. Then they've got to, am I right in assuming that they split it up evenly between everyone that's on the first page of the search result? Is that how it goes? I'd say it clicks traffic to people's site. Yeah. Okay. But then how do they manage payments to all of those content creators at scale?

ARTHUR: We're talking like, I know that's yeah. Well, it's a huge task that they need to figure out.

MICHAEL: It's one that seems insurmountable. Yeah. And like what happens if, people are going two or three pages deep in the search results and then clicking something like are all of them getting a bit of that profit share or is just the one that's clicked through to? What if someone clicks through to a website, has a terrible experience and then leaves? These are all great questions.

ARTHUR: They are great questions. I don't, yeah. As far as I know from my research, they haven't really kind of explained that part very well. Yeah. How that's going to work, the monetization side of things. But I guess it's kind of, Yeah. If you look at Google, basically they're trying to do the opposite. So yeah. Google don't want to pay publishers. Yep. These guys do.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So Google is the exact opposite. They will wholesale go and scrape content off people's sites and then display it straight in the search result to answer a question. Hopefully without them getting a Google perspective. Yeah. Hopefully without you even leaving Google and then they don't pay the creator one single cent for that.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And that's why there's a lot of publicate like publisher websites, which force paywalls and force people to subscribe because they're not making any money. People aren't visiting the articles, the content, they're not getting all that revenue. And I guess the end user is the one that kind of has to pay for it. Same as Wikipedia. You know, they're always asking for donations just because a lot of people will get the information they want without actually going and visiting Wikipedia because it just shows up.

MICHAEL: Yes. So like, it sounds great in theory. It's like great in theory, but in practice, I just can't see how they're going to be able to share 90% of their advertising profits with content publishers. It's such a broad, all encompassing claim there. So it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. Right. So have you used it? I have. So let's have a chat about results. How much have you used it?

ARTHUR: Briefly, I did a search for, I guess, some of our clients' keywords and the results were very mixed.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I thought they were garbage. Yeah. I thought they were very much us focused. Yeah.

ARTHUR: So I'm not sure whether or not it's ready to be rolled out across the rest of the world because it is meant to be using your IP and that geographical data and showing you results, which are relevant to you. But I've seen a lot of UK and American websites show up. Yep. So whether or not that's just not finished.

MICHAEL: Well, that IP thing is just, I don't think is even factoring into it because we, I search for local digital. our agency.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So let's do it now. Let's have a look.

MICHAEL: Well, I'll tell you, it's got like nine or so results before you get to us from like UK, US random businesses, like a business called dream local or something like that from overseas. So not the best search experience.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Dream local is the first one. Yup.

MICHAEL: Yeah, we were right down the bottom, like you had to scroll for ages.

ARTHUR: Some government agency, local digital declaration. From the UK? From the uk.gov.uk. Okay.

MICHAEL: That's garbage. Now do a keyword like SEO Sydney. I've done that one. We know that keyword well. Yeah. Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter results, just businesses we've never heard of. Like in our space, we know a lot of other businesses in our market. Yes. It's showing a whole bunch that I've personally never heard of before. So. Very limited sample size. They have a couple of searches, but from my testing garbage. Yeah. And like to, to convince people to move from Google over to yep. In a wholesale numbers that it's going to actually succeed. It needs to be way better. Yeah. The value proposition needs to be better. And it's just, it's just not.

ARTHUR: Yeah, so that could be just down to the fact that it's not completely ready to be rolled out. It could be in beta. It could just not be using geographical information. That's why it's showing us that UK. So yeah, not looking promising at the moment.

MICHAEL: So like with Google being so entrenched, like 90% of the market here and to Google something as a verb, it's not just the name of a business, it's a verb. I just don't think people care about privacy that much in large numbers and revenue being shared with creators. Sure, the creators love it, but that's not going to encourage like, let's say my family, for example, to go start using Yep over Google because I hear creators are getting 90% of profit.

ARTHUR: And personalization is important because they need that data to give you the best result. Yeah. A lot of the time.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. And for the ads that they're ultimately going to have to build, I guess the ad is like you type a keyword in, it can be very keyword, you know, exact match, keyword driven and location, but they're going to need to know location and all that stuff. So it depends on how much privacy is actually going into this. So do you think this would be a viable search engine?

ARTHUR: Um, as a standalone search engine, no, but I was reading an article earlier and the main aim of this was more to get or gather attention from, uh, I guess, bigger businesses, Microsoft, for example, and try to get them to adopt the model that they're proposing. So whether or not that's true, I don't know, but.

MICHAEL: Seems weird, right? They've spent 60 million so far building this thing. And then they want Google to go and not Google, Microsoft to adopt it, like just take their business model and use it themselves. Or they want to be acquired by Microsoft.

ARTHUR: I can read the little comment out. Go on. So basically 2019, I cannot pronounce this guy's last name, but he said the goal is then hypothetical search engine was to attract the attention of a larger company, e.g. Microsoft, that could afford to bring the idea to scale. So this actual quote was, considering the platform only generates a fraction of the company's $120 billion revenue, the organization could easily revamp Bing under the profit share model. It is my prediction and positive public sentiment alone that would have greater ROI than existing ad revenue. If we succeed in our endeavors, Google will finally get some long overdue competition for search.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so it sounds like he's saying he's trying to inspire Bing to do better.

ARTHUR: Potentially, yeah. That's exactly what he said.

MICHAEL: But it just seems an odd thing to do, like as a business, like Ahrefs, right? They've got their tool. They do what they do well with that. Like the marketing of their own brand is amazing. The tool's amazing. Like the product's amazing. They're going to go spend 60 mil building this whole search engine and get distracted by that just to inspire Bing.

ARTHUR: Maybe not to inspire, but maybe to sell it to Bing.

MICHAEL: Well, yeah, he didn't say that in any of those words, but that could be what they're trying to do there.

ARTHUR: And try to sell it for a nice little profit.

MICHAEL: Yeah. which that makes sense. There's got to be some sort of play going on here from Ahrefs. That's not just creating.

ARTHUR: I guess if like, like they say that the second biggest crawler behind Google bot, they have that to their advantage. So, you know, why not?

MICHAEL: Well, I can think of a lot of- 60 million reasons why not? Yeah, for now, like who knows what, like, cause they're building their own like whole network of servers and stuff. Like they're not using, let's say Amazon AWS, like cloud architecture. They're actually building their own server network.

ARTHUR: They've got their servers in Singapore. I think they're building like all around the world. I think the next server is going to be in the US, but I was reading, it's crazy. They've got like a thousand servers. Yeah. It's insane. So a lot of bandwidth.

MICHAEL: That's a big, so they got to have something at play here. Because their thing, like taking 10% of advertising revenue on a tiny amount of searches, I just can't see that ever being repaid. So the acquisition route makes sense.

ARTHUR: I think that might be the ultimate play, long-term play.

MICHAEL: How do you think they get people actually searching on it though? Like, so for me, it's going to be digital marketing SEO geeks will be the ones that use Yelp.

ARTHUR: People need to know that it exists first and foremost, which a lot of people won't. I don't think they will get people using it personally. I just think that, like you said, you know, there was DuckDuckGo, which was, I guess, the more popular alternative for those who are conscious about their privacy. I just don't think, you know, if DuckDuckGo has such a small market share, they're going to get a fraction of what DuckDuckGo had and it's just not a viable. or being like being way more or anyone outside of Google. So yeah, I just don't know. I don't like, I don't know. Acquisition is probably, probably what I think they're trying to do.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But no one's, I guess if they can build the infrastructure and the algorithms and all that, then that's worth being acquired, even without users, if it can be rolled up into Bing. For example. Or another search engine. Yeah, but no one's going to require it expecting it to be a self-sustaining thing with people using it already, right? No. And like you look at, what is it, Google, they pay Apple 15 billion, I was reading, a year to be the default search engine in Safari.

ARTHUR: For now, anyway, until they launch there.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We'll do an episode on Apple search when that gets announced. When's that coming out? I don't know. It's being hinted at. It's not official. But if that's what Google is willing to go to, to sort of maintain market share, how on earth is YEP stealing any of it? I don't know. They're up against it. It's going to be very interesting to watch on from the sidelines.

ARTHUR: See what happens. I'm sure these are all things that I've thought about already before they decided to invest 60 million. So watch this space, I guess. It's still very, very early days. Like we said, the results that it returns aren't good. In fact, they're shit. So yeah, we'll see how it evolves over time and see if there's any interest from competitors willing to adapt their model.

MICHAEL: Time will tell. But in the meantime, if you're interested in checking out, you can go to, yep, I like the name. I like saying it like that. Yep. I like the name. It's okay. Yep. Dot com. Just get it. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Have you done a yep for it? Very easy to remember.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it is. Three letters. I wonder what they paid for that domain name. Probably big money. Maybe that might've had a three letter domain name. I'm for sure they would have spent. Lots. But anyway, yep.com, go check it out. Search for your brand, search for some of the non-brand keywords in your space. See what you think of the results. See if they're as bad as we're saying they are at the moment. And maybe in a few months time, it's going to be better. It will be interesting to see it play out. But for now, that's about all we have time for. So until next week, happy yipping and happy SEOing. See ya.

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