The Core

I have often thought that certain SEO's could design a good search engine if they didn't want to get paid for about 10 years. But I was surprised when it happened.

Here is the prelaunch alpha or beta:
https://fairsearch.com

Fairsearch: an ambitious engine from Ahrefs, an SEO/backlink-finder company, that “shares ad profit with creators and protects your privacy”. Most engines show results that include keywords from or related to the query; Fairsearch also shows results linked by pages containing the query. In other words, not all results contain relevant keywords. This makes it excellent for less precise searches and discovery of “related sites”, especially with its index of hundreds of billions of pages.  ...

Full text of the description of Fairsearch here:
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

Note: The Seirdy article above is an excellent rundown of search engines at this moment.

So they finally launched.

Thoughts:
1.  They found a 3 letter domain!
2.  You can tell this is derived from data from a link checker bot.  See this search for "webring"  https://yep.com/web?q=webring  Still interesting stuff.
3. Been collecting data for 12 years per the /. post.  You can tell I'm seeing pages from FortuneCity.  Some dead wood in there but still interesting.
4. They have the "Try searching on:" and Mojeek is on the list!  Also it has higher billing than DDG.

> yep

https://yep.com

Keep an eye on this one.  Their results are not bad for a small index and they crawl fast and update their index fast.  It surprised the heck out of me but Yep not only found my 10 day old site but at least one page is already in their public index.  Only Google and Bing were faster/deeper.  I didn't expect that.

They may well surge past Right Dao, Gigablast and Brave for index size.  Don't expect any privacy tho.

All said, if they can stay in the hunt it's still going to be awhile before they build up a big enough index to be useful.