How would they crush kagi
That's the dumbest part of it all; Kagi's not an entirely new search engine. It's Google's index but without the ad-tech juicing, and some clever use of a few other search indices to specialize results.
(I.e. Google could unshit itself at any moment, it just doesn't want to.)
The problem being the aforementioned conflict of interest. The moment you're a competitor to Google Search (or any of Google's other products), they can kill your API access and ruin you.
"In a way, the brief flicker of Neeva’s existence tells everything you need to know about the last 20 years of search-engine supremacy. Building a search engine is hard. Building one better than Google is even harder. But if you want to beat Google, a better search engine is only the very beginning. And it only gets harder from there." [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva...
Not to mention Kagi's continued sustainability issues (28,071 users at the time of writing) [2] and their plans for their own AI products [3] [4] that would inevitably and eventually doom them.
[2] https://kagi.com/stats [3] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
Also, ADeerAppeared is right that government intervention aka a major breakup needs to happen for competition to thrive and I don't see it happening (although I hope I'm wrong).
And if you want to know our plans, just check our own blog [1].