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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

hope kagi takes ddg place in terms of adoption. never really liked ddg even though i always care about privacy.

I really don't get that sentiment. Currently Kagi is just as dependent on Google as DuckDuckGo is on Bing. That might only be temporary of course and Kagi does seem to be working on a search engine of their own.

Rather than wanting Kagi to take the place of DuckDuckGo, it would would be better if Kagi could take users from Google, and then when ready, drop Google as a search provider.

Kagi mixes google, bing, some non-profit small-web SE, and their own index.

I don't think they use Bing, but yes, Google, Marginalia, Yandex, Brave and others. I still fail to see how that's different to DuckDuckGo, who also run their own crawler. It's really weird that people are almost hating on DuckDuckGo for how they run their search engine, while applauding Kagi, for doing the same, but with a different business model.

I also assume that Kagi uses some shady residential IPs proxies and similar tricks to scrap Google while DDG has access to the Bing API.

You can buy access to the Google Search API, which is what I assume Kagi does. Building your product on being able to circumvent some Google restrictions seems like a bad business move, if you can buy the same service for a reasonable price.

Where can I buy it?

https://developers.google.com/custom-search

It's been available for ages. We used it to power the company internal search for a large enterprise I worked at 17 or 18 years ago.

Yes this isn’t an API to make a generic search engine.

Only if they changed that (which they might have as part of their cost-optimization). They said they mixed bing and google results back then.

Kagi should hire the Marginalia author.

We already include Marginalia results in Kagi [1]

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

DDG used to be the HN darling and you would get downvoted for saying anything negative or even insinuating that they are relying on Bing. Now the spot has been overtaken by Kagi but it looks like it suffers from the same problems. The counterargument that they have their own index as well is the same that was used for DDG, when the reality was that it was only used for widgets and other fluff. Let's see how it plays out for Kagi.

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