51–60 of 266 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If other tech companies really wanted to break this monopoly, why can't they just do it Google is a verb, nobody can compete with that level of mindshare.
Xerox is a verb, but most copy machines I see are made by their competition
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/31/archives/xerox-settlement...
> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results Crazy for a company to admit: "Google won't let us whitelabel their core product so we steal it and resell it."
Strange to pick on Kagi when there's much bigger companies on that list.
For anyone not acquainted Kagi is excellent and the people who work there strike me as nice and competent. I’m a harsh critic usually. Highly recommended.
> 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…
> If other tech companies really wanted to break this monopoly, why can't they just do it Google is a verb, nobody can compete with that level of mindshare.
Part of it is also the ecosystem - don't threaten adtech, because the wrong lawsuits, the wrong consumer trend, the wrong innovation that undercuts the entire adtech ecosystem means they lose their goose with the golden eggs.
Even if Kagi or some other company achieves legitimate mindshare in search, they still don't have the infrastructure and ancillary products and cash reserves of Google, etc. The second they become a real "threat" in Google's eyes, they'd start seeing lawsuits over IP and hostile and aggressive resource acquisitions to freeze out their expansion, arbitrary deranking in search results, possible heightened government audits and regulatory interactions, and so on. They have access to a shit ton of legal levers, not to mention the whole endless flood of dirty tricks money can buy (not that Google would ever do that.)
They're institutional at this point; they're only going away if/when government decides to break it up and make things sane again.
> 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…
Companies would rather sue than try and compete by investing their own money.
Kagi's AI assistant has been satisfying compared to Claude and ChatGPT, both of which insisted on having a personality no matter what my instructions said. Trying to do well-sourced research always pissed me off. With Kagi it gives me a summary of sources it's found and that's it!
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.
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.
If google is serving 90% traffic & others are unable to enter - Doesn't that mean google is doing something right for the customer and others are unable to outcompete it? Isn't this how life works?
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.
I guess they'd argue that the people in China don't count, because people in China don't get to choose Google. But yeah, the stats they use from "StatCounter" are clearly not representative for what the world uses.
If google is serving 90% traffic & others are unable to enter - Doesn't that mean google is doing something right for the customer and others are unable to outcompete it? Isn't this how life works?
Google is allowed to be big, be better and win users. But happy customers is not the full test of monopolization. The real question is, "Could a meaningfully better search engine realistically displace Google today?” If the answer is no, then competition is broken
ChatGPT clearly demonstrated that displacing Google is possible. All previous monopoly arguments seemed even more flimsy after that.