downside: doesn't seem to care much for boolean ("-keyword") search terms, instead opting for the modern thing of "let's actually search for that keyword, too!" v______v
No boolean search yet.
I wonder if they are including in that the money they already invested in the Ahrefs SEO tools. It seems to me that their SEO tools were already crawling a lot of content so this may be an extension of that / a new way to monetize the data. I personally know a lot of people who pay for their SEO tools so I imagine they have a decent amount of revenue.
There is a lot of intersection between Ahrefs tools and search. We were collecting web data for Ahrefs tools for 12 years, now we repurpose these data for Yep.
We do indexing ourselves and don't use any third-party APIs.