Well, this is a case of “didn’t see it coming”, but search engine tools company Ahrefs just told me that they have been working on their own search engine, yes, without telling anyone. They have put $60 million in it. It’s a unique idea to have your own search index instead of using Google or Bing APIs.
SEO tool Ahrefs invests $60 million in creating a creator-friendly search engine, ‘Yes’ https://t.co/AwgKkzRm9V by @Haje
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) June 3, 2022
How about the name? I don’t know, yeah, it seems pretty stupid to me, but at least the name is one character shorter than Bing, which is the other big search engine that I’ll only use on accident. Yes, it’s taking a new approach to online advertising, despite its name. He says he gives 90 percent of his ad revenue to content creators. It’s a pretty fancy shade:
“Let’s say the world’s largest search engine makes $100 billion a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90 billion to content creators and publishers,” the company describes the future it wants to live in. “Wikipedia content could probably generate a few billion dollars a year. They could stop asking for donations and pay the people who edit their articles a fair wage.
It’s an awesomely crazy way to fight for the Ahrefs company that started from nothing. Its CEO explains why he thinks it’s a good idea:
“The people who make search results possible should be paid for what they do. We saw how YouTube’s profit-sharing model helped grow the entire video-making industry. Dmytro Gerasymenko, founder and CEO of Ahrefs, says, “By splitting ad revenue 90/10 with content authors, we want to encourage the search industry to treat talent fairly.” He also says that his search engine is designed to prioritize privacy. “We do keep some information about the searches, but never in a way that can be used to find out who did them. For example, we will track how often a word is searched for and where the link that gets the most clicks is located. But we won’t profile you to send you ads.”
It might sound overly idealistic, but damn, that’s what got me excited about Yep in the first place. It’s the faintest echo of a web that was more innocent and hopeful than the cesspool of fake news and chaos that social media has turned the web into today.
I was a bit surprised to hear that the company decided to build its own data centers. It says it has already built more than 1,000 servers that store more than 100 petabytes of data. It’s an odd choice since cloud-based solutions are often more flexible, but Gerasymenko has a plan for that, too. He says cloud-based solutions are much more expensive for such a large infrastructure, with the goal of having hundreds or thousands of high-end servers running at full capacity 24/7.
This project didn’t start with a search engine, of course, because the company already had a lot of data from its regular business. Ahrefs has been crawling the web and storing information about it for 12 years to create its flagship product, a suite of SEO tools, for its clients. Its own crawler, AhrefsBot, drives search results. The company says that AhrefsBot visits more than 8 billion web pages every 24 hours. The company says that the new search engine will be available in all countries and in most languages.
So, 60 million dollars without external investment? Where did all that money come from? The company says it invested the money it earned from its paid subscriptions into the business. The company says it earns $100 million a year from its more than 50,000 customers, but has yet to receive any outside investment. The company’s main office is in Singapore, where 90 people work. There are 11 people working on the search engine project, including data scientists, back-end engineers, and front-end developers. The company tells me that Gerasymenko is helping build the search engine himself.
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Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn