Comment by Hackbraten
9 hours ago
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
This is a problem of their own invention.
Nobody said you have to index the entire web.
The web would probably be a lot healthier if we had several small search engines that focused on niches rather than 5 failed search engines that tried to index everything that was ever written and then ended up paying Bing.