Since the establishment of Google in 1998, the search engine market has been dominated by the well-known tech giant. We use the word “Google” as a verb nowadays because it has become so synonymous with search engines, so it can be hard to imagine anyone wanting to compete with them. However, SEO tools and service provider Ahrefs has announced that it wants to join the search engine ranks and compete with the big G.
There are other companies that compete with Google for the top spot in search engine usage, like Bing and Yahoo! These engines have been doing comparatively well in the race, picking up about 20 percent of the overall search volume together in 2017, but remaining dominated by Google (75 percent). Smaller search engines like DuckDuckGo and Tor have kept their place in the market as niche anonymous platforms, but it can’t be said that they’re on the same level.
So, what will Ahrefs have to do to have a shot, and how will their search engine be different?
What is Ahrefs and why build a search engine now?
Ahrefs is an SEO tool provider that tracks content Philippines Photo Editor, keywords, and page rankings of every website on the Internet. They were established as a small start-up in 2011, and have now progressed to become one of the primarily-used systems in the search engine optimisation industry. They’ve never branched into the search engine sector before, but on the 27th of March 2019 founder and CEO Dmitri Gerasimenko announced on Twitter that they intended to join the race.
He cited a couple of reasons that Ahrefs had decided to expand, and we’ll go through them here.
Privacy Issues
Google’s services come with the now inherent understanding that anyone who uses their search engine (and associated sites) will have their information anonymously shared across the board in order to tailor user experience. While this is a good feature to many people, there is also a large percentage of the population that doesn’t like the idea of their internet activity being stored and moved around for the purpose of analytics. It’s a well-known fact that as an advertising company, Google sells ad spots to advertisers based on anonymous personal information. This allows Google to tailor ads that users see across the browser according to their search activity. (More on how Google uses information here.)