I’m fairly sure Kagi reuses Google and Bing search results, then de-craps and applies your customized preferences to them. I’m not sure it even runs its own spider.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
My take (as a subscriber) is still that the majority of information I'm seeing is assimilated and distilled from the more mainstream sources, but I'm possibly underestimating how much comes from their own indexes.
I will admit that for news I tend to use the !gn bang to jump straight to Google News as it tends to be a more complete feed than Kagi's news tab, so wasn't thinking about TinyGem. But I'd also forgotten completely about Kagi's "Small Web" initiative for indexing non-commercial content that's not interlinked enough for other engines to prioritize it. I believe that's what Teclis (and possibly TinyGem as well) concentrates on.
IIRC, the few times I tried routing searches into that index I didn't find much, so I set it aside, but that's probably because I'm usually searching for more widely-consumed content.
> Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes including Brave, as well our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content.
[Edit] I guess it is possible that Google or Bing are hiding under "traditional search indexes including Brave".