It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
I was looking for this and it really annoys me how it thinks it knows what I want.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some limit to prevent abuse, but it hardly gets in the way of my normal usage.
Apparently all of this is to offset the costs from paying Google and Bing to run searches for them (the site basically takes results from Google and Bing and then combines them together with their own special sauce) but with a pricing model like this it seems like Kagi will remain a niche tool solely used by the wealthy.
The main paradigm shift necessary will be to pay at all for something that was "free" and is provided "free" to this day - even if the quality is worse.
They need to support their efforts somehow. Instead of showing ads or selling your data, they are going to charge a fee to use it.
I'm logged into Google all the time. I do this to get sharing working across Chrome. Others doe the same with Firefox. Some don't, because privacy.
I hear you think logins are 1000x more hostile than paying with your eyeballs. How would you suggest resolving this clearly conflicted view with logging in vs. how the revenue is made on a given site?
But that is changing. Internet marketing companies are now teaming up with websites so the websites to their dirty work for them and you end up getting tracked anyway -- but with much higher certainty as to who you are. That means that now, yes, logins are more hostile.
The web continues to get smaller and smaller.
As long as it remains niche, it might actually stay that way indefinitely. I’m just worried about Google taking inspiration from them. I bet whatever “tricks” they use now would get a lot less effective if they did.
To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor.
Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they have agreement in place.
This even feels like some experiment from Google to create a premium, paid, search product (like what they did with YouTube).
* It blocks all the GitHub and Stack Overflow copycat sites out of the box.
* I can add additional sites to the block list with two clicks.
* It up-ranks (semi-)official documentation like the Python docs or MDN over blog spam sites.
* I can manually up-rank sites (and even pin them to the top of the results) if I'd like to see them more often.
Kagi is awesome because where Google thinks it can guess what you want, Kagi gives you an easy way to tell it what you want.