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Comment by MallocVoidstar | Hacker News Reader

Kagi don't scrape, they pay other engines for API access: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

>Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide

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The only “other engine” that matters is really a thin paid SERP façade in front of a scraped Google result. In other words, Kagi pays for access to an API whose implementation is basically live scraping Google and throwing away the ads.

There are a few other indexes that Kagi’s aggregator mixes in (such as Bing Search) but those haven’t been contributing much in terms of meaningful results. The sheer size of Google’s index still dwarfs all the others, including Bing Search.

So yes, Kagi doesn’t scrape but they pay SERP providers who do.

Marginalia likely returns better results than Google, when it returns useful results. DDG/Bing likely returns average quality results which can be better than Google's slop results. It's not true that Google is the only useful one.

They pay scraping sites for results, including SERP API. When I pointed this out, last time Kagi was discussed on Hacker News, an employee of Kagi said that they're trying to build their own internal index, but he didn't provide details.

They use a ton of different search index's from what I've seen. Kagi Small Web is also awesome

I believe they are building their own index but targeted towards useful results not included in the others

Is Marginalia the only real competing search engine?

AFAIK Brave Search is also using its own index.

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