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Comment by kornhole | Hacker News Reader

Yes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.

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As someone who uses Kagi, I think it is absolutely not accurate to say they are a search engine rather than a meta search engine. Most of their results come from the other engines you listed.

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

Interesting, I always had the impression they had their own index. Shame.

As per the first sentence on that page, they do. It's just not their only source, and from my experience it is far from the main source. You can see "% of unique Kagi results" on each search; these are the results from their own index.

More countries have nukes than companies have actual indexes

But do more countries actually build them?

Pretty sure kagi is a bing wrapper too, although they blend in some other datasets.

Kagi's main results come from Google actually. (edit: see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html - Kagi really shows how good Google could be, since it's mostly using the Google index and then doing user-friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)

While I'm not disagreeing that Kagi's main results from Google, the source you linked doesn't specifically say that. Just says:

> "Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist!"

> "We’re grateful to have access to Google's search technology and infrastructure for Kagi."

So I wonder what the actual results mix is. Like I said, could be mainly from Google.

Edit: Added additional quote.

I could be wrong, but I think they're playing to their early adopter audience, that being tech workers.

Google is terrible at tech searches, without verbatim and now "web" search. Kagi spending work in this area, and indexing this area, might bear good fruit.

I firmly believe Google will release Premium Search at some point. They did it quite successfully with YouTube...

One wonders if the popular narrative around crappification of Search is partially self-induced to prime consumers for premiumization.

Mojeek has its very own index.

Never heard of Mojeek and tested it right now, surprised how fast it feels! Going to use it as my default for a while.

Just tried it and it led me to a 403 error page: “Sorry your network appears to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time.”

Qwant also relies on Bing (and was not usable during yesterday's incident)

Quant also relies on Bing API.

Quant or Qwant? Qwant does not rely on the Bing api but has its own index.

Are you sure about that? It doesn't completely rely on it but didn't it use bing as one of the search providers? I'm probably completely wrong and my info is outdated but I'm asking because it would be pretty special (in a good way!) if they use their own index exclusively.

Qwant was not usable yesterday during the Bing outage so that pretty much shows they cannot function without Bing (even if they do have some auxiliary indexes of some sort)

Qwant, sorry. On Wikiledia they mention Bing multiple times: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant

Qwant was also out of service today due to Bing API outage: https://www.gamingdeputy.com/bing-outage-exposes-qwant-and-d...

Qwant is also a meta engine, and was also down yesterday.

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