Can Upstart Search Engine Yep.com Eat Into Google's Dominant Market Share?

You've probably never heard of Yep.com but they want you to be using their site every day. They want you shunning Google in favour of performing searches on Yep for the ultimate betterment of the entire web. But where has Yep come from, what are its aims and why does it think it can make any sort of impact in a landscape dominated by Google?

What is Yep?

Ultimately, Yep is yet another search engine trying to take market share away from Google. It was the brainchild of Ahrefs founder Dmytro Gerasymenko, whose name probably won't mean much to you, but those within the digital marketing world will be familiar with the company he started.

Ahrefs is a specialist SEO tool for marketers that began life as a comprehensive database of backlinks. This database was useful to people in the SEO world who could easily see the different links across the web that pointed to any given site or page from a site.

The tool was able to compile this database due to its bots crawling the web to find and store information about link relationships. Having these bots already in place enabled the company to begin indexing sites in the same way as Google does, but why did they want to?

The Yep USP

Whilst the original Ahrefs tool was created to help understand link relationships it developed over time into a whole suite of cloud-based services designed to support SEO specialists, and today is one of the most popular all-in-one SEO management tools on the market. Ahrefs gathers and monitors data across multiple search platforms, but by far and away the most useful data is that from Google. Customers want to know where they can be found in Google search results and the search terms they are returned for.

Seeing first hand just how important Google data was, Ahrefs quickly recognised that the web was now reacting to Google rather than the other way around. And this is where Yep aims to disrupt the market.

Yep.com's goal is to share 90% of their revenue from ad sales with the content creators whose work drives eyeballs to those ads. So instead of search engines keeping the lion's share of search ad income, Yep would be distributing it to the talent.

How Dominant is Google Search?

It won't surprise you to learn that Google is the most popular search engine on Earth. But the scale of its dominance might just raise an eyebrow and its current global market share is over 91%.

Its closest competitor, Microsoft's Bing, manages barely 3% of market share worldwide. And this is from one of the most successful and valuable companies of all time.

By every measure this is a phenomenal level of dominance in a market that's not short of competitors. More on them later.

But How Have Google Blown Everyone Else Out the Water?

In short, Google just did a better job of searching the web than anybody else. Before Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page unleashed their new search engine in 1998 the options users had to seek out websites had been pretty poor. Many of the best known search engines of the time were essentially just big directories, like an online Yellow Pages, which relied on manual submissions. What's more there was little consensus between those online search forerunners on how best to rank different sites when many of them competed for the same search terms.

The reason Google very quickly overtook the 90s search engines (sites like Altavista, Excite, Hotbot and Infoseek) was down to their unique PageRank formula. Initially dubbed BackRub, this method by which to distinguish sites from one another applied a value to every page of every site determined based on the sites linking to them. Suddenly links were acting as a sign of approval for a site's content and those sites with the most links tended to serve user queries best - after all they'd effectively already been vetoed by other sites who would typically only link out to them with good reason.

This PageRank formula is still used today although Google has long since stopped sharing the values they apply to each page. In reality the Google search algorithm of today is considerably more complex than it was when it launched 24 years ago, taking into account a great many more ranking factors than mere backlink volumes. But back in 1998 using a site's links to determine how prominently it should be returned in search results for any given keyword was revolutionary. This was the search giant's original killer feature.

The Birth of an Entire New Industry

Once site owners and managers (commonly known as webmasters at the time) began to understand the relationship between links and ranking prominence, seeing that the sites with the most links were returned in the best positions, it didn't take long for them to begin gaming the system. Search Engine Optimisation was born and grew to become the $80 billion industry it is today.

Of course there's a great deal more to SEO than simply accumulating the most links for your site, and there's a great deal more to the Google story than the invention of PageRank.

Another USP of Google's game changing search engine was its capacity to proactively crawl and index websites rather than reactively having to wait for them to be submitted. Googlebot is actively crawling tens of thousands of pages every second and returning all the data it finds to Google's many servers so the central index is as up-to-date as possible.

When you perform a search, Google scours its index for the appropriate results, so this index needs to be fresh and it needs to be reliable. Consequently Google have always invested heavily in server capacity, which is why it's incredibly rare for any Google services to be offline.

Google's Continued Growth

Rivals were quick to recognise Google's growth trajectory and in 2002, the once mighty Yahoo tried to buy Google Search for $3 billion. The offer was rejected and the big G is now worth over 50 times that of Yahoo.

The 2000s saw Google diversify from their core search product (earning them billions in revenue from targeted ads), expanding rapidly into other areas they could use to further harvest valuable user data. 2004 saw the launch of Gmail, then Google Maps followed in 2005 and the company bought fledgling video sharing site YouTube in 2006. In 2005 they also acquired the Android mobile operating system - now the world's most popular OS - and by 2008 had released their own browser, Chrome, which didn't take long to become the number one web browser in the world.

It could be argued however that the most significant acquisition of this time was the DoubleClick ad platform that Google bought for a not insignificant $3.1 billion in 2007. Their core income stream had always been advertising revenue and with DoubleClick they were now able to serve and sell more ads than ever before.

The other products in the Google portfolio simply plugged in even more user data to the growing ecosystem, allowing for ever more targeted ads - which are more desirable to advertisers due to having more favourable conversion rates. After all, advertising a new car to somebody you know is currently interested in buying a new car is considerably more effective than paying to run that ad to 1,000 people you don't know much about.

You might think that with so many successes everything Google touched turned to gold but there have been some products that didn't make the grade. Perhaps most notable among Google failures is their ill-fated social media platform, Google Plus, launched to try and compete with the dominant Facebook. The service never took off and the company abandoned Plus in 2019 whilst Facebook (who had acquired Instagram in 2012) grew to become the biggest challenger to Google's ad network.

The Search Pretenders

Back to the world of search, though Google quickly saw off the early web search engines, there are still many alternatives available today. Whilst Google retains a phenomenal market share of over 90%, proliferation of internet access around the globe has meant that even eating into 0.5% of the global market can still be worth millions in ad revenue. Alternatives to Google Search also exist to offer users more choice and provide different search services.

Microsoft Bing

Probably the best known current competitor to Google, Bing's 3% market share makes it easily the world's second most popular search engine but it has never really threatened Google's dominance. In fact, despite the obscenely deep pockets of Microsoft - who are an even more valuable company than Google, with a market capitalisation worth more than Google and Facebook combined - their search engine has only ever sought to mimic its better known rival. Innovation has been sorely lacking and Bing appears happy to cement its place as worldwide number two simply by virtue of following Google's lead and acting as a none too dissimilar alternative.

DuckDuckGo

A search engine that's growing in popularity since its launch in 2008, DuckDuckGo pitches itself as THE privacy search engine. They claim not to use any trackers, which keeps users' data private and prevents third parties from accessing search data for ad targeting.

Unlike a number of other privacy focused alternatives, DuckDuckGo has its own crawlers and ranking algorithm so isn't dependent on Google or Bing for its results. This devotion to private data means they don't share numbers on their volume of regular users but they estimate there are around 50 million monthly users worldwide.

To put that into perspective, Bing - which lets not forget has market share of just 3% - sees roughly 1 billion searches per month. That means DuckDuckGo gets only 5% of Bing's traffic!

Ecosia

This planet-friendly search engine provides results powered by Bing but has only minimal tracking in place so offers more privacy than its bigger and better known search rivals. The real USP of Ecosia however is its pledge to use its advertising revenue to plant trees around the world. To this end the site claims to have planted over 60 million trees since it was started back in 2009.

According to web monitoring service SimilarWeb the Ecosia site gets over 120 million visits a month, mostly in the US and northern Europe.

Qwant

This French search engine is the youngest on this list and notable for being one of the only search engines based in the EU with its own indexing capability independent of Google or Bing. It also pushes its privacy credentials heavily (you may be noticing a recurring theme by this point).

It's not particularly popular outside of its native France (where it's still behind both Google and Bing) but the estimated 31 million visits it gets per month could rapidly increase if EU privacy laws tighten yet further and start to choke Google and Bing's privacy-ignorant approach. Let's call it a "one to watch" anyway.

Baidu and Yandex

The biggest search providers in China and Russia respectively, these two dominate in their countries of origin but are little known elsewhere. The sheer size of their domestic markets means they're among the world's most popular search engines, even if that popularity is concentrated in the Chinese and Russian speaking worlds.

What About Yahoo?

Predating every other operation on this list, amazingly Yahoo is still going and still making money. However, its status as a distinct search engine is debatable due to the fact it has used Bing to power its results since 2009. It primarily bills itself as an online portal rather than as a standalone search engine but it still serves more search users than any other site that isn't Google or Bing.

Still a Crowded Market Then...

Why, therefore, would the SEO software company Ahrefs decide they want to muscle in? If even the mighty Microsoft can barely eat into 3% of the global search share, what hope is there for a little known US company with revenues of just $100 million?

To understand why Ahrefs have taken this plunge and invested $60 million into their new search engine Yep we need to consider its raison d'etre. Unlike the majority of the current main Google competitors detailed above, who have either sought to simply follow the market leader or differentiate themselves based on offering greater privacy, Yep is doing something different.

Yes, the engine is adamant that user privacy will be respected, but that's not enough to stand out from the crowd anymore. What Yep is doing that, as far as I can tell, has never been attempted before, is put the control back in the hands of the online content creators whose work is being returned in search results and gaining the search engines all their valuable clicks.

When you consider that a Google or a Bing delivers most of the traffic to well known websites, whether they're big name publishers or small time bedroom bloggers, it's easy to see why those sites end up paying the search giants to keep that traffic coming. Then they've got to monetise that traffic they're now paying for, which means either hosting often intrusive ads on behalf of Google or Bing, or jumping into bed with other brands on an affiliate basis.

So What Does Yep Do Different?

Their argument is that if 90% of the revenue they can generate from search ads goes back to the content creators they've sent traffic to, those sites will be able to reinvest that newly dependable income into producing more high quality content, without being beholden to advertisers, sponsors and affiliates.

In many respects the concept is similar to the way in which Ecosia needs users to want to "do the right thing" and pick their search engine over rival products. If Ecosia can convince 120 million environmentally conscious searchers to use their service each month, could Yep eventually appeal to those determined to distribute ad revenues more equally and promote better quality content?

Will It Work?

To answer that question we need to consider whether Ahrefs can, first, offer a comparably high quality of search results to its major rivals. Obviously search result quality is subjective but it's going to be difficult for Yep to keep up with the rapid pace of Googlebot on its endless mission to catalogue everything on the web, even if its own crawler is impressively hardworking and currently more active than Bing's main search crawler.

However, the quality of results is irrelevant if nobody ever has the inclination to find them, and this is where I see a, sadly, fatal flaw in the dream. We all know that the bands we listen to get more money if we buy their records and their merchandise but instead we stream their songs on Spotify. Similarly, public service broadcasters provide far more varied and engaging output than commercial radio or TV stations do. But the audience numbers are always going to be higher for Strictly Come Dancing than a documentary on European art movements of the 1930s.

If we watch the art documentary on the public service broadcaster and we buy our music direct from the artists, these creators earn more money and can produce more of that content we've enjoyed. It feels like the way things should be. But the stats don't lie. We aren't supporting the artists in the way they want to be supported. We can't even keep BBC Four on the air!

Ultimately Yep's vision is admirable, but it is idealistic, and I will happily eat my words if in five years' time it is paying out billions to the content creators it pledges to share its revenues with. Right now however, by its own admission, there's no revenue to share. And I can't see that changing.??