Over the past week digital marketers all around the globe have been exposed to the news that Ahrefs, the same company which created one of the most popular SEO toolsets available to a consumer market have revealed its search engine, “yep”.

We first heard about “yep” back in 2019 when the CEO, Dmitry Gerasimenko announced his plan to create a search engine that supports content creators and protects users' privacy.

3 Years Later, this idea has become a reality. With the company spending Just under £50 million on resources, you can now visit this search engine at www.yep.com.

Following the same Ideology as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Ahrefs search engine keeps only 10% of profits made from Ads while the other 90% goes to Content Creators. To put this to scale, if this new search engine were to generate the same revenues as Google, Ahrefs would earn £7 billion yearly while the other £70 billion made would get distributed to content creators across the internet.

Companies like Wikipedia would likely earn a few billion dollars every year from its content and they would then be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles.

There would also be no need for paywalls and affiliate links.  Overall it would be a great platform to be on as someone who is searching for a topic will be rewarded with high-quality articles and the creators of the articles will be rewarded with money.

The User Experience

The UI itself is very minimalist, the Search Page being just a search bar, with the “yep” story underneath it. From this page, you can start browsing or click on the menu in the top right in order to read more about the engine.

Unfortunately, It seems the only setting you can adjust with the search engine is the language and there is no “dark mode” available as of yet.

The actual searching experience is quite pleasing though, After Searching the Term “Digital Marketing”, we received 10 blue links to trusted sites, One of which being Google themselves! Depending on what you are searching for, the engine also displays knowledge panels which pull information directly from Wikipedia.

The Future for Yep

After Using Yep, it seems that it has huge amounts of potential as a leading Search Engine due to its Privacy features and its Profit Sharing plan but there are certain problems which need a solution otherwise yep could end up as another failed browser.

No Dark Mode

The lack of dark mode makes it unfavourable for a huge amount of people on the internet. And looking at this issue from a bigger picture, this is such a small issue to fix for such a large impact.

Speed

While Browsing the internet using this search engine, It has become apparent that this search engine is really slow. Each query takes at least 4 seconds to return a result. This looks even slower when you put it next to Google Processing a query as Google returns a value within a second every time. Even Duck Duck Go was Faster.

Summary

Although there are downfalls to yep, you must keep in mind that this engine was only just released. There is a lot of time for the developers to implement a dark mode and there is plenty more time for more and faster servers to be set up worldwide.

We have no doubt if Yep succeeds then it will encourage a new generation of content creators to grow their passions in order to become successful.