Ahrefs, a popular SEO toolset provider platform, announced this morning on Twitter that they want to compete with Google by building their own search engine. I know April Fools Day is around the corner, but today is not April 1, and the CEO of Ahrefs, Dmitry Gerasimenko does not seem to be joking here.

The announcement. “Ahrefs is working on general purpose search engine to compete with Google,” said Dmitry Gerasimenko, the founder of Ahrefs.

Ahrefs is working on general purpose search engine to compete with Google. Sounds crazy, right?

But lets talk about two huge problems with Google which they will never want to fix: — Dmitry Gerasimenko (@botsbreeder) March 27, 2019

Why do this? Dmitry Gerasimenko said for two reasons, the first being privacy and the second being profit sharing. The privacy focus is similar to the DuckDuckGo model, a search engine that competes with Google on the proposition of not using user data for profit.

The second reason is to share the profit with the publishers that create content that appears in the search index. The profit share would be a 90/10 split, where the publishers take 90 percemt. “Imagine they suddenly implement 90/10 profit share model sending $90B per year to publishers who create content,” he said.

Can it be done? Ahrefs already has experience crawling the web, they have a very good understanding of how search works, links and the metrics that go into ranking. But can they in reality compete with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and others? We have seen search engine start up after search engine start up fail and go out of business.

It is an ambitious project, and it will be fun to watch Ahrefs give it a shot.

More details. Check out the stream of tweets from Dmitry on Twitter for more details on this project.