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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.

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

Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?

I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.

My pushback on this idea and your previous comment in this thread is that a search engine is a service being provided to me.

I pay Kagi, they give me search results. It’s not an ecosystem. None of their competitors are all that much of an ecosystem, either.

If Kagi goes out of business tomorrow it’s really not my problem, with the exception of the prorated balance of the subscription.

The only thing that really matters is that running searches in Kagi is a better experience in Kagi than Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or most of the rest. That’s what makes me pay for it.

I don’t really need to know how the sausage is made (except for the privacy aspect).

This. We are all too worried about the future. Like today's "I won't use Codeberg because tomorrow they could ban all repositories that contain Chinese characters." Well if that happens then you move. We all die in the end anyway.

You undervalue our collective momentum.

The speed with which many of us respond when a tech company does something really stupid is a key reason that things are not even shitter.

What's your favourite software? Linux? You know when Linus dies it'll just get absorbed by IBM, right?

Arch, btw.

I guess you can't make such ecosystem before growing sufficiently large. And for that you need to rely on something for some time first.

I think that ship has sailed [0].

If Microsoft hasn’t managed to build a meaningful search index after 17 years of sinking billions in it, there’s a good chance that no one ever will.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search (cf. section _The problem: A search monopoly_)

If engine A uses the results of engine B, and engine B uses the results of engine A, there is a problem :-).

It is a bit weird that a ‘search engine’ is using other companies search results. They aren’t the only one doing this though.

Why reindex everything? You just need to show the relevant information

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this was always the plan for Kagi. Google has been rather distracted and complacent in their, former, core business. If Kagi is bootstrapping their indexing to emerge on the other end of this as the next "good" search, then good on them.

I'll continue to support them because it's a great experience.

The search engine is a lot more than the index. And they have their own index

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