Ukrainian creates 'Google killer': why does he need it and how he hopes to outplay the online giant

“Killer” of Google and paid subscriptions. How a native of Nizhyn (Ukraine) creates a search engine and what makes it unique, reports "European truth".

Photo: Shutterstock

There are many search engines in the world. The first of these was Yahoo !, which appeared back in 1994.

Now the most popular search engine is Google. According to June data, 92,47% of users prefer it.

Its closest competitor is Bing from Microsoft. Although, according to Google, the most common question on Bing is “Where can I download Google?”

Baidu is popular in China, Yandex is popular in Russia, and among people who are concerned about their personal data, DuckDuckGo, which operates on open source on the principle of maintaining anonymity.

However, another player will soon enter the market: a search engine from the creators of Ahrefs, which in the near future may become a “Google killer.”

Ahrefs is a service that helps website owners and SEOs identify key competitors, analyze a product, find reasons for low search rankings, and improve the quality of search traffic.

In 2010, Ahrefs was created by Dmitry Gerasimenko, a native of Nizhyn and a KPI student, who in 2012 moved to Singapore and began developing his company there. She now earns about $66400000 a year, according to Owler.

How will the new search engine work, thanks to which it can impose the fight on the global monopolist?

Dmitry says that the idea of ​​​​creating a search engine was always interesting, but he did not understand why create a search engine when there is Google - “it’s free, everything is cool there, everything works well.”

But since on his main project (SEO service - EP), they work a lot with webmasters (people who maintain sites - EP), it was clear what problems they had with Google.

“For example, it is starting to remove some websites from search results and is adding more and more of its services. They try to build everything around themselves and do not give traffic to others,” says Dmitry.

“At some point the thought arose: how can this be done better? For example, why not compensate those who write the content? There is this contrast when they (Google – EP) use Wikipedia content in their search results.”

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“But we see that Wikipedia shows a banner every year saying, 'Give us $5 to pay for our servers,' and Google makes $160 billion a year using Wikipedia content. And everything seems to be ok. But it seems to me that this is not ok.”

Gerasimenko says: “The idea of ​​a search engine was born with thoughts about the Internet, which we all dreamed of. When a search query displays the top knowledge, and not advertising on which Google simply makes money.”

And he adds: “This is also a story of injustice, because content creators who work on the quality of the material, check it, must earn money for their work directly through the “90 to 10” business model.”

“On web pages when you create a blog or news site, you will need to place the author ID. Then our crawler (crawler is a program that systematically makes requests on the Internet to create a web index, a repository of copies of all web pages on the Internet - EP) will see this ID and write that this content is yours,” explains Dmitry Gerasimenko.

The most interesting task of the project is to find a criterion for evaluating content so that creators receive fair payment. The developers plan to introduce a “utility metric” of content to determine the payout amount under the profit sharing model.

Creators will receive 90% of all search engine advertising revenue based on the usefulness of the content they create. Gerasimenko plans to share the profit with all content creators, regardless of the scope of its application - be it a shopping review or encyclopedic knowledge.

“We don’t want to “track” users,” says Dmitry, “initially we want to make sure that we don’t have user history. Of course, we need to store the queries themselves somewhere so that we can improve our search results.”

He explains that he needs to know what people are looking for in general, but his search engine will not create a history of a person's searches so that he can track what you were looking for.

Therefore, information that can identify you is initially cut off, and then processed by a new one in the system without this information.

User personal information and search queries

“Search queries are information that the user enters into the search bar, so that we understand which queries are more, which are fewer, how to work with advertisers, how to improve algorithms,” says Gerasimenko.

“The personal information that Google and other search engines collect and store to sell to advertisers and companies for research is a different story.”

“That is, we will not store information about who you are, what you do, what your dog’s name is, what your preferences are in any area of ​​life, and we will not transfer it to any third parties,” the developer assures.

Photo: Shutterstock

Regarding the work of DuckDuckGo, Dmitry said that there is a problem: they do not index the entire Internet. Therefore, when a request comes to them, it goes further to Bing, Yandex, somewhere else. Then they collected these results and gave you the best. That is, a request that comes from you goes to several companies and you need to trust them.

“How are we better in terms of privacy? We are building our own data center, we have our own servers that belong to us, we use cloud. That is, this data does not leave us anywhere. It turns out that we have more control,” the creator emphasized.

Its developers are trying to make good quality results, while making it affordable for them: “Not a single company, no startups build data centers and servers, it’s very expensive. This needs to be supported, it requires incredible expertise, you need to hire people who understand this, and there are very few of them on the market.”

To create a new company or a product, everyone uses cloud servers that are owned by Amazon or Google. In fact, this is the transfer of information that is stored on other people's servers, works and is processed.

There is a certain risk in this.

“We have already invested about $50 million to set up our data center. Having seen it, you can imagine what hopes the company is putting into the search engine project,” says Dmitry. “Data centers are located in Europe, in the Netherlands, and the new one, where most of the search is done, is in Singapore. There are plans to open another one in the US, and another one in Europe to be closer to users.”

Relevance

Dmitry emphasized that relevance is what his team is working on: “Our first goal is to achieve quality like Bing, and then we will strive for Google.”

Regarding the influence of personal data on the quality of results for specific users, Gerasimenko said: “If I’m not mistaken, the user’s personal information does not greatly affect organic search results, because there are clear parameters for assessing the quality of content. For example, if you look at some kind of news query, informational, encyclopedic, Google evaluates the information it produces according to certain parameters: how many sites have referred to this information, how verified the information is, how relevant and not outdated. That is, the history of the issuance is far from personal data. Advertising uses personal data. If Google makes 100 billion, then say 10 billion is more than enough to provide this service. You can earn money by showing advertisements in search results in approximately the same way. Another difference is that Google is a huge company with a huge number of beneficiaries, investors and interested people who, simply by existing, earn a huge part of the company’s profits.”

Ahrefs is a slightly different company, explains Dmitry. “We currently employ only 80 people. We have never attracted investment. That is, there are no people who are interested in putting more profit into their pockets. Yes, there will be some operating costs for maintaining servers and teams. But if there is so much profit, then you can completely cover the operating costs and get a very, very good income.”

Google has a relatively small part of the team directly involved with the search engine. They spend more on launching 20-30 startups annually.

There is a different structure of costs and profits. It's very different from what's happening at Ahrefs. “Therefore, we can afford to give away 90% of the profit,” adds Dmitry.

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The developer explains that any site owner can add this markup on the page and say that this content is his, he would like to receive a profit share from it.

“Initially, our advertising income will be small, but there will also be few people who posted this identifier. Therefore, we will be able to compensate them for everything normally. As advertising revenue increases, people will pay more attention to us, and there will be more people posting this ID. We plan to grow at a normal pace in two directions: the arrival of money and to whom it needs to be distributed,” says Dmitry.

Test run

Dmitry Gerasimenko said that a test launch of the new search system is already underway: “Since September, Google was forced to add alternative search engines on Android in Europe. Our search engine has been there since September. We are already collecting some users and, based on their requests, we see what people are looking for, what our search results are, and we continue to improve them. We don't want to attract too many visitors until we are sure of our relevance. We don’t want people to come, see, be disappointed and never come again. So you can call it "pre-testing".

Since Ahrefs is a private and independent company, there is no financial or managerial pressure on our projects. Therefore, the release of the search engine is tied solely to the technical readiness of the product for testing by a wide audience, and not to any specific dates.

“If we translate readiness into percentages, then at the moment search readiness is somewhere around 87%. A month ago it was 60%,” clarifies Dmitry.

Over the ten years of the existence of the company Ahrefs, which is engaged in SEO-optimization of sites, they have built a bot that walks on sites, collects a web index, that is, a copy of the entire Internet, billions of pages.

“The bot collects, stores and somehow “processes” this entire body of knowledge. In essence, this bot provides a very strong technological advantage to build a visible competitor to Google,” says the developer.

Web index

“There are three web indexes: Google, Microsoft and ours. If you search different search engines on Google, 90% of them either take results from Google, change the branding and show them as their own, or take them from Bing, because Microsoft even sells them, it’s official,” explains Dmitry.

And he adds that you can buy Bing results, add your branding and earn from ads yourself, but there is a caveat: you have to earn more than you spend on buying these results.

“We were lucky that the first Ahrefs product was, in fact, the first step that organically moves on to building a search engine. Now we have developed a technologically intelligent base that allows us, with great advantage, to further deal with beautiful problems and optimize these things,” says Gerasimenko .

Search engine name

It is not yet known what name the search engine will have.

Dmitry says that it turned out that it is not so easy to find a free domain that fits the product concept, a name that does not intertwine with existing companies and players. That is, the company is in no hurry with the name.

When asked about investments, Gerasimenko said that the business model of the new search engine does not imply the participation of investors.

It is planned that the system will operate independently. Since the market for the creative economy is growing strongly, there is no clear need to raise money.

Ahrefs has never attracted investment. For ten years the company already has the skill to earn and effectively spend its money.

It is known that Google also wanted to make profit-sharing search engine Neeva, but they planned an “80 to 20” scheme.

There was information that they came to Ahrefs, wanted to cooperate, but the company refused them.

“There it’s not 80 to 20, there it’s 20 to 80. We communicated with them. They wanted to collaborate with us and gain access to our data. Since we are obviously moving towards competition, our collaboration did not work out,” said Dmitry. — One interesting thing: it was after our conversation that they came up with the idea of ​​profit-share. Before this, they were focused on a subscription search engine. It’s nice that we were able to “sell” the profit-share idea to our competitors.”

Search engine promotion

About the strategy for promoting the project, Dmitry said: “If we pay content creators for their content, then it is profitable for them to tell about our search engine. It’s like with Facebook: one friend invited another, and then, if all your friends are on Facebook, you want to go there too. Creators benefit from having users read them through our search engine. For the user this does not change anything, but for the content creator it changes a lot. Although for the user this is the security of his data. Another thing we discovered while working on the search engine: many media outlets need to install a paywall. The media asks: subscribe to us, this is a conditional donation for our cool content.”

Gerasimenko says that the best content is hidden from a wide audience, because the media really needs to make money. With the profit-sharing model, media that really work on some kind of in-depth research and investigation will be able to earn and provide cool information to a wider audience.

He claims that clickbait, affiliate (referral) links should go out of the Internet.
“Plus, premium content will go under the paywall, because publishers will close their task if they make money from the content. At the same time, they have no need to hide it.”

Gerasimenko concludes that in this case, as many readers as possible will have access to the best content through our search engine, because it has such a business model. This story can take off and change a lot of things.

What's the timeline?

The timing of the product's appearance on the market has not been specified. Gerasimenko noted that they will “release” a product that will be quite good.

The company has the opportunity not to run into any deadlines. When he sees that everything is working as it should, then there will be a release.

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