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Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#231

Post by direwolf20 »

lostlogin wrote: post #174
0x1ch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't, Kagi seems to (hopefully). I meant this more as a jab at countries willing to block Google, as they're generally dictatorships / authoritarian in nature. Oh the irony, as an american saying this in 2026....

They do, but do they align with your own? It’s difficult, because Kagi results are so good and the alternatives are often business that behave worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349797

I've heard Yandex results are good, and they often avoid Google bias. I have no moral problem with Kagi integrating results from Yandex and Google.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#232

Post by elektronika »

0x1ch wrote: post #22
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #18

The statistics in this article sound like garbage to me. Google used by 90% or the world? ~20% of the human population lives in countries where Google is blocked. OTOH, Baidu is the #1 search engine in China, which has over 15% of the world’s population… but doesn’t reach 1%? These stats are made measuring US-based traffic, rather than “worldwide” as they claim.

Google is only blocked in places where it would already be hard for a company with morals to work in, if not outright blocked as well. This probably represents traffic globally, excluding those places. Instead of downvoting blindly, please state which countries are currently blocking Google that would willingly allow Kagi, a AI/Privacy focused search engine company to exist in their domain? The results may surprise y…

Google and Facebook would be very happy to operate in China, but they're too closely tied to the US intelligence apparatus to agree to the terms that China requires.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#233

Post by idiotsecant »

z64 wrote: post #77
ares623 wrote: post #37

Kagi should start building an index of sites that are trying to escape the current slop internet. It’s know they have the Small Web thing. But I’d like to see an index of a “neo internet” that blocks Google et al.

I've been tossing around the very early idea of seeing what we can do to elevate alcoves of the web such as Gemini[1] through Kagi. I am slightly conscious of that some people might not like us operating in that space, it's been on my TODO to poll people about it and take a quick pulse. I love the tech and think we could give it meaningful exposure. Is this along the lines of what you have in mind - any other active…

How would that work? Like Kagi caches the gemini content and delivers it as web content? I suppose that might annoy the kind of person who runs a Gemini server.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#234

Post by antiframe »

direwolf20 wrote: post #198
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just so wild how great Duckduckgo is & how under-rated it is. It's available in all major browsers (Here in zen browser, it doesn't even have a default browser but rather on the start page it asks between the three options, google duckduckgo and bing but yes if you press next it starts from google but zen can even start from ddg, its not such a big deal) Duckduckgo is super amazing. I mean they are so amazing an…

DDG is just an anonymizing front-end for Bing. Your DDG results are Bing results.

Then the anonimization is a key component of their goodness. When I compare searches between Bing and DDG I find the DDG ones superior every time.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#235

Post by 0x1ch »

lostlogin wrote: post #174
0x1ch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't, Kagi seems to (hopefully). I meant this more as a jab at countries willing to block Google, as they're generally dictatorships / authoritarian in nature. Oh the irony, as an american saying this in 2026....

They do, but do they align with your own? It’s difficult, because Kagi results are so good and the alternatives are often business that behave worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349797

The yandex thing seems to be an argument made in bad faith at this point.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#237

Post by marginalia_nu »

xnx wrote: post #57
direwolf20 wrote: post #4

I hope they cache search results to further reduce the number of calls to Google. And Marginalia Search was not mentioned? Marginalia Search says they are licensing their index to Kagi. Perhaps it's counted under "Our own small-web index" which is highly misleading if true.

> "Our own small-web index" Has Kagi ever said what this is? I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is just kagi.com pages or a download of Wikipedia.

I believe it was formerly run under the name Teclis[1]. Reportedly they took it down for a while but now it's apparently back up. Has quite an extensive writeup on how it operates on the page.

[1] https://teclis.com/

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#238

Post by grayhatter »

Kagi uses Brave search index? huh, TIL... that's very disappointing. And it's the kinda thing that would prevent me from ever paying for Kagi. Brave's crawler, is agressive, dumb (it doesn't appear to back off if it hits a number of 503s), and critically, it ignores robots.txt. They even admit they choose to ignore it. To top that off their crawler doesn't identify itself, instead masquerading as a real browser. I've had to ban the entire Hetzner ASN from my site to get them to stop.

On one hand, I really want Kagi to succeed. They very often, do seem to care about the parts of the world and internet that I care about. But on the other... to me, willingly associating, and financing a company that willingly brags about ignoring consent, is a non-starter for me.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#239

Post by cush »

The idea of a search index being a public utility is an interesting idea but I’m not sure what it would do for trust. Governance is the biggest question mark, and with the current administration I’d say let Google run it and have less restrictive access to the index. My Google search usage has dropped probably 99% over the last two years.

My hope is that the powers that be figure out how to monetize these products with dollars instead of attention. Google’s ad-driven business model ruined the internet - we don’t need that in our AI products too.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#240

Post by w10-1 »

ghm2199 wrote: post #24

> Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad.. Not too be pedantic here but I do have a noob question or two here: 1. One is building the index, which is a lot harder without a google offering its own API to boot. If other tech companies really wanted to break this monopoly, why can't they just do it — like they did with LLM training for base models with the infamous "pile" d…

Other comments mention difficulty, cost, conditions, etc.

Also, competitive agreements: of the big players like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, Amazon, etc., only Google is in the ad business. But it has credible threats of digging into their businesses - GCP, Android, (not to mention software licenses and competitive access to e.g., Samsung), etc. So they agree to cede the ad world to Google, to keep Google out of their businesses.

The injunctions cannot be effective. Google ads are essentially a tax at a fine scale that rational people chose when it didn't change site behavior. But then Google ads changed the nature of the web itself, converting every snippet of information into an opportunity to monetize. Neither would change with a public search.org, and injunctions to license ad-free indexes won't change site behavior or publishers' self-interest in selling access to their content to Google alone.

Google knows the injunctions are unworkable and ultimately ineffective. The only question is what price they have to pay to the Trump judiciary to counter them.

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