Popular SEO tool company Ahrefs has spent $60 million in data centers on a new search engine that could directly compete with Google, Bing and Yandex.
Once launched, the Ahrefs search engine will be available in all countries and in most languages, as the company is equipping itself with a lot of processing power to handle the vast amounts of data that will be produced.
The company also plans to share 90% of the as-yet-unknown search engine's ad revenue with content creators.
alternative search engine
Ahrefs also announced the launch of its first data center in Singapore with approximately 1000 servers storing and processing 100 petabytes of web data as part of its search infrastructure for a new search engine, and also plans to open a data center in the United States by the end of 2022.
In 2019, Ahrefs founder and CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko announced plans to create an alternative search engine that will share 90% of ad revenue with publishers.
"Creators who make search results possible deserve to be paid for their work. We've seen how YouTube's profit-sharing model has made the entire video industry prosper. By sharing advertising revenue 90/10 with authors of content, we want to build momentum towards fair treatment of talent in the search industry,” said Gerasymenko.
"In other words, we save some search data, but never in a personally identifiable way. For example, we will track the number of times a word is searched for and the position of the link that gets the most clicks. But we will not create your profile for targeted advertising.
The company also confirmed that the new search engine will not collect personal information from users by default, such as geolocation, name, age, gender, preferences, etc., but plans to collect aggregate search statistics to improve algorithms, spell checks, and search. . . suggestions
Ahrefs has been tracking and storing data on the web for 12 years and has developed a web crawler called AhrefsBot that visits more than eight billion web pages every 24 hours.