This Yep thing isn’t a search engine. It’s a content-marketing campaign for Ahrefs. They don’t want to compete with Google. They want press for themselves.

Those two goals are not mutually exclusive.

That shows you have a distinct lack of understanding of what Ahref's core business model is built upon. It's not a PR stunt and they don't want to directly compete with Google either.

They want it for search data. They don't need to be anything near Google's size to make it worthwhile.

AHREFS has 2 things going for it: 1. a freaking giant crawled index, 2. a freaking giant pile of metadata on google search rankings.

I'd like to throw mine into the mix (we're a non-profit that plans to donate 80% of our profits to other non-profit organizations and charities, but we need more traffic before Google will enable ads, so at the moment then we're ad-free and not generating any income to donate):

https://ask.moe

I want to suggest a different wording in the sentence where you say you’re a non-profit that donates 80% of the profits.

How can a non-profit make profit to share? Don’t you mean the income?

Ask.moe is the opposite of what consumers actually need.

Consumers don't need another monetization model exploiting their web search.

They need a distinct web index/crawler infrastructure that bypasses SEO.

Better would be to show no/less ads and encourage users to donate to charities directly. Helping commercial interests exploit users so that you can donate some of the profit from that is really inefficient.

If we're adding our own, https://www.unscatter.com is mine. It's focused on the news vertical rather than general search.

It's not monetized but it's also only costing me less than $50 a month in hosting and cloudflare costs to support.

you.com