Comment by aquir

10 hours ago

Time to pay for Kagi everyone!

I'd never pay for, let alone use, a search engine* that has an official Discord group.

* Kagi seems to just scrape and provide a mix of other search engine's results, meaning it's really just a metasearch engine.

  • They also have their own index. But in any case, what matters here is the product UX itself not the internal details, and they do offer a classic search experience

  • Unfortunately some hip folks got it in their head that the correct way to provide support is discord.

Until you realize that Kagi only works well because it uses a (paid) third-party API which behind the scenes does a classic Google search, scrapes its results in real time, throws out the ads, and then returns the cleaned-up results.

If Google Search changes, then Kagi's search will be impacted directly.

  • This isn't entirely true, because they use more than one search index.

    • The other search indexes are largely negligible in comparison: [0]

      > This is not a competitive market. It is a monopoly with a distant second place.

      > The search index is irreplaceable infrastructure. Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad. Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.

      [0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

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