FTA:
> Context matters: Google built its index by crawling the open web before robots.txt was a widespread norm, often over publishers’ objections. Today, publishers “consent” to Google’s crawling because the alternative - being invisible on a platform with 90% market share - is economically unacceptable. Google now enforces ToS and robots.txt against others from a position of monopoly power it accumulated without those constraints. The rules Google enforces today are not the rules it played by when building its dominance.
> The robots.txt played a role in the 1999 legal case of eBay v. Bidder's Edge,[12] where eBay attempted to block a bot that did not comply with robots.txt, and in May 2000 a court ordered the company operating the bot to stop crawling eBay's servers using any automatic means, by legal injunction on the basis of trespassing.[13][14][12] Bidder's Edge appealed the ruling, but agreed in March 2001 to drop the appeal, pay an undisclosed amount to eBay, and stop accessing eBay's auction information.[15][16]
> Google built its index by crawling the open web before robots.txt was a widespread norm, often over publishers’ objections.
As someone who was a web developer at that time, robots.txt wasn't a "widespread norm" by a large margin, even if some individuals "expected it to be respected". Google's use of robots.txt + Google's own growth made robots.txt a "widespread norm" but I don't think many people who were active in the web-dev space at that time, would agree that it was a widespread norm before Google.
Why would you tell G that you are doing something? Why tell a competitor your plans at all? Just launch your product when the product is ready. I know that's anathema to SV startup logic, but in this case it's good business
> Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.
edit: this is wrong
> Bing: Their terms didn’t work for us from the start. Microsoft’s terms prohibited reordering results or merging them with other sources - restrictions incompatible with Kagi’s approach. In February 2023, they announced price increases of up to 10x on some API tiers. Then in May 2025, they retired the Bing Search APIs entirely, effective August 2025, directing customers toward AI-focused alternatives like Azure AI Agents.
It's odd that Microsoft hasn't aggressively pushed for "openness". That's in the usual playbook for attacking a market leader.
(And then pull up the ladder once you've become king of hill.)
Microsoft will probably never topple Google, absent anti-monopolistic enforcement. But they can certainly attack Google's profits.
Going further back, AlltheWeb was actually pretty decent but was eventually bought by Overture and then Yahoo and ended up in their graveyard.
For everyone else it's the longer grind trying to gain visibility.
> Reducing its share from 90% to 80% may not sound like much, but it would imply a doubling in size of alternative sources of supply, giving China’s customers far more room for manoeuvre.
Ranking an index is hard. It's not just BM25 or cosine similarity. How do you prioritize certain domains over others? How do you rank homepages that typically have no real content in them for navigational queries?
Changing the behavior of 90% of the non-Chinese internet is unraveling 25 years and billions of dollars spent on ensuring Google is the default and sometimes only option.
Historically, it takes a significant technological counter position or anti-trust breakup for a behemoth like Google to lose its footing. Unfortunately for us, Google is currently competing well in the only true technological threat to their existence to appear in decades.
not to mention that people mostly need wikipedia, the news, navigating the infuriating world of websites of big service providers (gov sites, or try to find anything on Microsoft's dark corner of the web), porn and brainrot
but it's awfully hard to make traction on a business that provides this.
I have always wondered but how does wayback machine work, is there no way that we can use wayback archive and then run a index on top of every wayback archive somehow?
1. IIUC depends a lot on "Save Page Now" democratization, which could work, but its not like a crawler.
2. In absence of alexa they depend quite heavily on common crawl, which is quite crazy because there literally is no other place to go. I don't think they can use google's syndicated API, cause they would then start showing ads in their database, which is garbage that would strain their tiny storage budget.
3. Minor from a software engineering perspective but important for survival of the company: since they are an artifact of record storage, to convert that to an index would need a good legal team to battle google to argue. They do that the DoJ's recent ruling in their favor.
Even if they see it, it's a classic chicken & egg problem: it's not worth the time of the site operator to engage with your offer until your search engine popular enough to matter, but your search engine will never become popular enough to matter if it doesn't have a critical mass of sites to begin with.
Oh, almost never. That's exactly why search sucks now.
Google Search sucks not because Google is incapable of filtering out spam and SEO slop (though they very much love that people believe they can't), but that spam/slop makes the ads on the SERP page more enticing, and some of the spam itself includes Google Ads/analytics and benefits them there too.
There is no incentive for these companies to build a good search engine by themselves to begin with, let alone provide data to allow others to build one.
No, the customer isn't 'always' right, but these guys like to get big and once big, fuck you, we don't have to listen to you, we're big; what are you going to do, leave?
Search indexes are hard, surely, but if you were to strip it to just a good index on the browser, made it free, kept it fresh, it cannot be 100 billion dollars to build. Then you use this DoJ decision and fight against google to not deny a free index to have equal rights on chrome you can have a massive shot at a win for a LOT less money.
I mean... Duckduckgo uses bing api iirc and I use duckduckgo and many people use duckduckgo.
I also used bing once because bing used to cache websites which weren't available in wayback archive, I don't know how but It was pretty cool solution for a problem.
I hate bing too and I am kind of interested in ecosia/qwant's future as well (yes there's kagi too and good luck to kagi as well! but I am currently still staying on duckduckgo)
The small distributed team grinding it out against the goliath. They are awesome and perhaps the right example of what a path like this would look like. Maybe someone from their team can chime in on the difficulties of building a search engine that works in the face of tremendous odds.
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 and their duck.ai or ai actually provides concise data instead of Google's AI
DDG is leaps ahead of Google in terms of everything. I found Kagi to be pleasant too but with PPP it might make sense in Europe and America but privacy isn't/ shouldn't be the only who only pays. So DDG is great for me personally and I can't recommend it enough for most cases.
Brave/Startpage is a second but DDG is so good :)
It just works (for most cases, the only use case I use google is for uploading images to then get more images like this or use an image as a search query and I just do !gi and open images.google.com but I only use this function very rarely, bangs are amazing feature by ddg)
Same here. It may be 'not very good' for highly specialized or complex technical questions ... but I do research across a broad range of (non-specialized) topics daily. I often need to find 2nd and 3rd points of view on a topic ... or detailed facts about singular events ... and I rarely need to go to the 2nd page. And all ad-free!
It's a remarkable education tool. A curious, explorative kid these days could easily sail WAY beyond their age group using DDG. I can only wish I'd had it.
Their recently added 'Search assistant' consistently provides a couple of CITATIONS to backup its (multi-leveled) responses (Ask for more, get more.) I've seen nothing like it elsewhere. It is even quite good at diggin up useful ... and working ... example code for some languages. Also with citations.
People complain that user-agent need to be filled. Boo-hoo, are we on hacker news, or what? Can't we just provide cookies, and user-agent? Not a big deal, right?
I myself have implemented a simple solution that is able to go through many hoops, and provide JSON response. Simple and easy [0].
On the other hand it was always an arms race. It will be. Eventually every content will be protected via walled gardens, there is no going around it.
Search engines affect me less, and less every day. I have my own small "index" / "bookmarks" with many domains, github projects, youtube channels [1].
Since the database is so big, the most used by me places is extracted into simple and fast web page using SQLite table [2]. Scraping done right is not a problem.
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
Building a metasearch engine is not hard to do (especially with AI now). It's so liberating when you control the ranking algorithm, and can supplement what the big engines provide as results with your own index of sites and pages that are important to you. I admit, my results & speed aren't as good as Kagi, but still good enough that my personal search engine has been my sole search engine for a year now.
If a site doesn't want me to crawl them, that's fine. I probably don't need them. In practice it hasn't gotten in the way as much as I might have thought it would. But I do still rely on Brave / Mojeek / Marginalia to do much of the heavy lifting for me.
I especially appreciate Marginalia for publicly documenting as much about building a search engine as they have: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/
Exactly, why can't we just hoard our bookmarks and a list of curated sources, say 1M or 10M small search stubs, and have a LLM direct the scraping operation?
The idea is to have starting points for a scraper, such as blogs, awesome lists, specialized search engines, news sites, docs, etc. On a given query the model only needs a few starting points to find fresh information. Hosting a few GB of compact search stubs could go a long way towards search independence.
This could mean replacing Google. You can even go fully local with local LLM + code sandbox + search stub index + scraper.
Google has a monopoly, an entrenched customer base, and stable revenue from a proven business model. Anyone trying to compete would have to pour massive money into infrastructure and then fight Google for users. In that game, Google already won.
The current AI landscape is different. Multiple players are competing in an emerging field with an uncertain business model. We’re still in the phase of building better products, where companies started from more similar footing and aren’t primarily battling for customers yet. In that context, investing heavily in the core technology can still make financial sense. A better comparison might be the early days of car makers, or the web browser wars before the market settled.
But if they were to pour that money strategically to capture market share one of two things would happen if google was replaced/lost share:
1. it would be the start of the commoditization of search. i.e. search engine/index would become a commodity and more specialized and people could buy what they want and compete.
2. A new large tech company takes rein. In which case it would be as bad as this time.
Like what I don't get is that if other big tech companies actually broke apart monopoly on search, several google dominos in mobile devices, browser tech, location capabilities would fall. It would be a massive injection of new competition into the economy, lots of people would spend more dollars across the space(and ad driven buying too) money would not accrue in an offshore tax haven in ireland
To play the devils advocate, I think the only reason its not happening is because meta, apple, microsoft have very different moats/business models to profit off. They all have been stung one time or another is small or big ways for trying to build something that could compete but failed. MS with bing, Meta with facebook search, Foursquare — not big tech but still — with Maurauder's Map.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/31/archives/xerox-settlement...
Money. Google controls 99% of the adverting market. That's why its called a monopoly. No one else can compete because they can never make enough money to make it worth the costs of doing it themselves.
Microsoft had a chance (well another chance, after they gave up IE's lead) to break up Google's browser monopoly, but they decided to use Chromium for free instead.
Ultimately all these decisions come down to what's more profitable, not what's in the best interests of the public. We have learned this lesson x1000000. Stop relying on corporations to uphold freedoms (software or otherwise), becuase that simply isn't going to happen.
They chose to use Google with a revenue sharing agreement. Google is very well monetized. It would be very difficult for Apple to monetize their own search as good as Google can.
>they decided to use Chromium
Windows ships with Microsoft Edge as the browser which Microsoft has full control over.
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.
Companies would rather sue than try and compete by investing their own money.
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.
The Search Engine wikipedia article [1] has a section on Russia and East Asia market share, which confirms that the roll up used for world wide counts is off, unless the number of people using the Internet is drastically different in some of the countries.
Russia
* Yandex: 70.7%
* Google: 23.3%
* Baidu: 59.3%
* Other domestic engines: "smaller shares"
* Bing: 13.6%
* Naver: 59.8%
* Google: 35.4%
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#Market_share
Choice/Free will is an arbitrary line in the sand, one could argue how much choice we have about consuming google search when it is "85-90"% monopolistic business with well documented anti-competitive practices.
Chinese consumers perhaps have more choice than we do, Baidu is only about 60% market share. They do get to choose, it more that Google is not one of the options available to them, it is not like if not Baidu then it is a Phone Book.
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 you!
It’s difficult, because Kagi results are so good and the alternatives are often business that behave worse.
No I didn't make this up.
And there was reporting like this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/zuckerberg-s-meta-was-w...
Although a few years they seemed to completely abandon the effort and started to criticize China, although I can't find the article.
You'll be amazed at how quickly Zuckerberg "adapts" to things. Which is why I never trust a single word that comes out of his mouth.
they present numbers and say "world" like whole countries and groups of people don't matter. very arrogant.
It remains to be seen how or if the remedies will be enforced, and, of course, how Google will choose to comply with them. I am not optimistic, but at least there is some hope.
As an aside: The 1998 white paper by Brin and Page is remarkable to read knowing what Google has become.
I’d pay a more if I could opt out of Yandex, and if it integrated properly with iOS (Apples fault).
All without using an account, saved locally in the browser.
>Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
The customer list matches what is listed on SerpAPI's page (interestingly, DeepMind is on Kagi's list while they're a Google company...). I suppose Kagi needs to pen this because if SerpAPI shuts down they may lose access to Google, but they may already have utilize multiple providers. In the past, Kagi employees have said that they have access to Google API, but it seems that it was not the case?
As a customer, the major implication of this is that even if Kagi's privacy policy says they try to not log your queries, it is sent to Google and still subject to Google's consumer privacy policy. Even if it is anonymized, your queries can still end up contributing to Google Trends.
Crazy for a company to admit: "Google won't let us whitelabel their core product so we steal it and resell it."
Another way to look at it is that if you publish a service on the web, you have limited rights to restrict what people do with it.
Isn't that the logic Google search relies on in the first place? I didn't give permission for Google to crawl and index and deep link to my site (let alone summarize and train LLMs on it). They just did it anyway, because it's on a public website.
The are however more than happy to use technical measures, like blocking accounts. And because of their position, blocking your Google account may be more damaging than a successful lawsuit.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
It doesn’t even prevent indexing. If a page is linked from elsewhere, Google will show it in search results even if noindex’d.
And why does Google get to set these rules on my site anyway? I didn’t agree to them.
Google's crawler is given special privileges in this right and can bypass basically all bot checks. Anyone else has to just wade through the mud and accept they can't index much of the web.
Google doesn't really have a leg to stand on and they know it.
Is it though? It feels so better than Google results[1], while being still built partly with Google results.
In the last 3 years as a Kagi customer i have rarely if ever felt the need to use bangs !g and on few occasions i did use them, it was with instant regret.
In the previous decade or so using DDG, using bangs !g Google would be 30-50% of searches, i would have to consciously try the results first instead of starting with !g and then think to myself DDG was at least getting the query data to improve their results.
[1] While the de-cluttered UI is a relief, on just the results list comparison, Google search is so bad that less time saved in not redrafting the queries constantly, filtering out the spam, the AI summaries, sponsored content, all the "cards" , recommended search listicles on is worth more than the $10/month.
The blog post talks about that specifically - Bing unlike Google does have Index licensing program but their terms forbid reordering that is key reason Kagi is not also using Bing in their index mix.
My point is Kagi is similar to a car tuning company like Hennessey, Brabus they take a base product and make it much better for a premium, they are not selling knock-offs.
"Aspirin" is a famous example. It used to be a brand name for acetylsalicylic acid medication, but became such a common way to refer to it that in the US any company can now use it.
With kagi, one cannot miss the opportunity to generate a similar verb " kag-are", which sounds exactly like "going number 2" (in a relatively rude way), which is what I ironically use every time I decide not to use the generic "search" verb. I consider it one of the minor benefits of being a kagi user!
For example I'd hear people say "I'll Google that", then use Yahoo when they were still a major search engine.
I admit I've used something like "are you banned on Google or what?" a couple of times though.
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!
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
Will Kagi file an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs
Perhaps Google will fund amici in support of their position as they did in the Epic appeal
https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2025/01/10/fight-over...
What even is market rate? Kagi themselves admits there's no market, the one competitor quit providing the service.
Obviously Google doesn't want to become an index provider.
> Google must provide Web Search Index data (URLs, crawl metadata, spam scores) at marginal cost.
I'm guessing that the "marginal cost" of a search is small and it's not connected to the how much ad revenue that search is worth.
Should actually be - Layer 3: Paid, ad-free, subscription-based search. (It's a subtle omission that indicates the direction Kagi search will eventually take).
Call me naive, but I imagine Kagi would be VERY hesitant to force ads on their users, given that such a step would risk alienating a major part of their customer base, as they're well aware.
If they were secretly planning to to it somewhere down the road, they could just as well do it the usual and proven way and lie about it until they've build a sufficient moat, which they're not having right now. IMO, they have precious little to gain from hinting at it like this now.
And even if it were the case that this omission was consciously about keeping a door open for such a change in business models, there's a whole lot of leeway in approaches that involve ads, apart from the 100% user-as-a-product way that Google went with.
Given the high customizability of their search, they e.g. could give users the option to turn ads on or off. Some people (don't ask me who, but I keep being told they exist) don't mind being shown ads or might even desire them.
I remember way back when the first Google ads were clearly labeled as such and stood visually apart from organic search results. I personally don't think it would mean the end of the world if Kagi did something similar - in a transparent way, and preferrably as an opt-in.
But at this point it's all needless speculation in my view.
We're in the middle of an AI bubble propping up the whole friggin US economy all by itself, driven mostly by a company that claimed to be a non-profit until a few years ago.
What does ai have to do with this? The sooner that bubble bursts the better IMO.
I'm considering Kagi a strategic ally in the fight against big tech right now.
It isn't a big tech company (yet). They don't have much of a moat either. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, they will be absolutely dependent on aligning their behaviour with their customer's interests, lest they lose them and go out of business.
With that said, Kagi has appeared friendly so far.
This isn’t quite the same thing though.
I hope you are wrong, if not… wow.
edit: h/t to https://xkcd.com/641
Anybody is free to cancel their subscription the moment Kagi turns out a malicious actor. And then... go back to Google, I guess?
For me it would probably mean to build a search from scratch. For 90% of my search use cases it's pretty straightforward. I mostly visit the same sites..
Really hope they don't go this way...!
There is no way the government provides a search engine that doesn’t become a political football or weapon.
Maybe in a different age.
I completely agree that monopoly remedies, such as fair open paid licensing, are needed. I prefer that to breakups, when this kind of cooperative/competitive leveling works.
Maybe it doesn't have to be based in the US? Maybe we could make this a world effort, run by a coalition instead, across border lines, like a library for the modern age.
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.
Exa, Parallel and a whole bunch of companies doing information retrieval under the "agent memory" category belong to this discussion.
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.
Most "cost saving engineering" is involved in finding cases/hueristics where we only need to use a subset of sources and omitting calls in the first place, without compromising quality. For example, we probably don't need to fire all of our sources to service a query like "youtube" or "facebook".
Marginalia data is physically consolidated into the same infra that we use for small web results in our SERP, but also among other small scale sources besides those two. That line is simply referring directly to https://kagi.com/smallweb (https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb).
Nobody said a search engine needs to have fresh data, for example. Nor has anybody said a search engine needs to index the entire web. Yet these are two things every search engine tries to do, and then they usually fail to compare with Google.
To put it in another way, the reason why TikTok succeeded against Youtube is exactly because TikTok wasn't trying to be a Youtube.
While there might be arguments for building a different product (and LLM-based search like Perplexity is trying it), there appears to be enough demand for a "good Google" that Kagi is trying to address.
When I search for a brand new restaurant, I want to see a map entry for that restaurant and a link to a newspaper article, ad, or facebook post announcing the opening of that restaurant (though I probably won't click on the third).
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.
——
Criteria for posts to show on the website
If the blog is included in small web feed list (which means it has content in English, it is informational/educational by nature and it is not trying to sell anything) we check for these two things to show it on the site:
- Blog has recent posts (<7 days old)
- The website can appear in an iframe
——
Emphasis mine. Restricting visibility to blogs that post at least every week doesn’t feel very ‘small web’ to me.
https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
This would not only allow better competition in search, but fix the "AI scrapers" problem: No need to scrape if the data has already been scraped.
Crawling is technically a solved problem, as witnessed by everyone and their dog seemingly crawling everything. If pooled together, it would be cheaper and less resource intensive.
The secret sauce is in what happens afterwards, anyway.
Here's the idea in more detail: https://senkorasic.com/articles/ai-scraper-tragedy-commons
I'm under no illusion something like that will happen .. but it could.
I'd love to see Google, Bing and others being incentivized (wink, wink) to contribute (technically, financially, etc) to CommonCrawl or Internet Archive since they already do this.
Any naive crawler is going to run into the problem that servers can give different responses to different clients which means you can show the crawler something different to what you show real users. That turns crawling into an antagonistic problem where the crawler developers need to continually be on the lookout for new ways of servers doing malicious things that poison/mislead the index.
Otherwise you'll return junk spam results from spammers that lied to the crawler.
I've never done it so maybe it's easier than I imagine but I wouldn't be quick to assume that crawling is solved.
But my impression is that it's more a question of scale and engineering time than having to invent something new.
(disclaimer: I also never worked on a internet-scale search system, maybe I'm very off the bat here as well).
Because text matching was so difficult to search with, whenever you went to a site, it would often have a "web of trust" at the bottom where an actual human being had curated a list of other sites that you might like if you liked this site.
So you would often search with keywords (often literals), then find the first site, then recursively explore the web of trust links to find the best site.
My suspicion has always been that Google (PageRank) benefited greatly from the human curated "web of trust" at the bottom of pages. But once Google came out, search was much better, and so human beings stopped creating "web of trust" type things on their site.
I am making the point that Google effectively benefited from the large amount of human labor put into connecting sites via WOT, while simultaneously (inadvertently) destroying the benefit of curating a WOT. This means that by succeeding at what they did, they made it much more difficult for a Google#2 to come around and run the exact same game plan with even the exact same algorithm.
tldr; Google harvested the links that were originally curated by human labor, the incentive to create those links are gone now, so the only remaining "links" between things are now in the Google Index.
Addendum: I asked claude to help me think of a metaphor, and I really liked this one as it is so similar.
``` "The railroad and the wagon trails"
Before railroads, collective human use created and maintained wagon trails through difficult terrain. The railroad company could survey these trails to find optimal routes. Once the railroad exists, the wagon trails fall into disuse and the pathfinding knowledge atrophies. A second railroad can't follow trails that are now overgrown. ```
This is exactly right, but the thing most people miss is that Google has been using human intelligence at massive scale even to this day to improve their search results.
Basically, as people search and navigate the results, Google harvests their clicks, hovers, dwell-time and other browsing behavior to extract critical signals that help it "learn" which pages the users actually found useful for the given query. (Overly simplified: click on a link but click back within a minute to go to the next link -> downrank, but spend more time on that link -> uprank.)
This helps it rank results better and improve search overall, which keeps people coming back and excluding competitors. It's like the web of trust again, except it's clicks of trust, and it's only visible to Google and is a never-ending self-reinforcing flywheel!
And if you look at the infrastructure Google has built to harvest this data, it is so much bigger than the massive index! They harvest data through Chrome, ad tracking, Android, Google Analytics, cookies (for which they built Gmail!), YouTube, Maps and so much more.
So to compete with Google Search, you don't need just a massive index, you also need the extensive web infra footprint to harvest user interactions at massive scale, which means the most popular and widely deployed browser, mobile OS, ad tracking, analytics script, email provider, maps, etc, etc.
This also explains why Google spent so many billions in "traffic acquisition costs" (i.e. payments for being the Search default) every year, because that was a direct driver to both, 1) ad revenue, and 2) maintaining its search quality.
This wasn't really a secret, but it (rightfully) turned out to be a major point in the recent Antitrust trial, which is why the proposed remedies (a TFA mentions) include the sharing of search index and "interaction data."
> 14 renowned European research and computing centers have joined forces to develop an open European infrastructure for web search. The initiative is contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty as well as promoting an open human-centered search engine market. [1]
> The Open Web Index (OWI) is a European open source web index pilot that is currently in Beta testing phase. The idea: Collaboratively and transparently secure safe, sovereign and open access to the internet for European organisations and civil society. The index stores well structured open web data, making it available for search applications and LLMs. [3]
This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709957) points out that Google got its start via PageRank, which essentially ranked sites based on links created by humans. As such, its primary heuristic was what humans thought was good content. Turns out, this is still how they operate.
Basically, as people search and navigate the results, Google harvests their clicks, hovers, dwell-time and other browsing behavior -- i.e. tracking what they pay attention to -- to extract critical signals to "learn" which pages the users actually found useful for the given query. This helps it rank results better and improve search overall, which keeps people coming back, which in turns gives them more queries and data, which improves their results... a never-ending flywheel.
And competitors have no hope of matching this, because if you look at the infrastructure Google has built to harvest this data, it is so much bigger than the massive index! They harvest data through Chrome, ad tracking, Android, Google Analytics, cookies (for which they built Gmail!), YouTube, Maps, and so much more. So to compete with Google Search, you don't need just a massive index, you also need the extensive web infra footprint to harvest user interactions at massive scale, meaning the most popular and widely deployed browser, mobile OS, ad footprint, analytics, email provider, maps...
This also explains why Google spends so many billions in "traffic acquisition costs" (i.e. payments for being the Search default) every year, because that is a direct driver to both, 1) ad revenue, and 2) maintaining its search quality.
This wasn't really a secret, but it turned out to be a major point in the recent Antitrust trial, which is why the proposed remedies (as TFA mentions) include the sharing of search index and "interaction data."
We all knew "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" but the fascinating thing with Google is:
- They charge advertisers to monetize our attention;
- They harvest our attention to better rank results;
- They provide better results, which keeps us coming back, and giving them even more of our attention!
Attention is all you need, indeed.
But due to their business model I'm not sure they are ranking "usefulness" as much as you think.
Useful results ultimately don't benefit Google because Google makes no money on them. Google makes money on ads - either ads on the search results page, ads on the destination pages or (indirectly) from steering users to pages which have Google Analytics.
It's likely the actual algorithm balances usefulness to the user with usefulness to Google. You don't want to serve up exclusively spam/slop as users might bounce, but you also don't want to serve up the best result because the user will prefer it over the ad on the SRP page. So it has to be a mix of both - you'll eventually get a good result, after many attempts (during which you've been exposed to ads).
Google does enjoy the myth that they are unable to combat spam/slop while in reality they do profit off it.
It is plausible, but I'd guess Google would not risk that. I'm sure Google has pulled other shenanigans to get more clicks, like stuffing more and more ads, and making ads look like results (something even I personally have fallen for once), but I think they're too smart to mess with their sacred cash cow.
Can you explain this one?
Gmail cookies, such as SID and HSID, act as unique identifiers for a signed-in Google account, allowing Google to track user activity across its services and millions of third-party websites. These cookies, often lasting 2 years, link browsing behavior—like searches and site visits—to a specific user profile to personalize ads, measure campaign performance, and analyze site usage, even on non-Google sites that use tools like Google Analytics or AdSense.
There are other times (usually not work related) when I want to explore the web and discovering some nice little blog or special corner on the net. This is what my RSS feed reader is for.
It may be related to which type of content you search for, field of work or even how you search, but you're certainly not the only one I've heard complain that they need !g way to often for alternatives to be viable.
Google is very good is you need to buy something though. Their ad system yields rather good results, most of the time. Lately I've noticed that they are more and more serving ads for questionable drop shippers and foreign webshops, rather than brands I trust, so they might also be declining in that department.
I find the Kagi results to everything I need, and often lead me to more niche personal blog posts specific to what I am looking for. Surfacing small blogs posts is not something I remember getting much of in DDG and I'm really enjoying that.
It may be impracticable to share the crawled data, but from the stand point of content providers, having a single entity collecting the information (rather than a bunch of people doing) would seem to be better for everyone. Likely need to have some form of robots.txt which would allow the content provider to indicate how their content could be used (i.e research, web search, AI, etc.).
The people accessing the crawled data would end up paying (reasonable) fees to access the level of data they want, and some portion of that fee would go to the content provider (30% to the crawler and 70% to the crawler? :P maybe).
Maybe even go so far as to allow the Paywalled content providers to set a price on accessing their data for the different purposes. Should they be allowed to pick and choose who within those types should be allowed (or have it be based on violations of the terms of access)
It seems in part the content providers have the following complaints:
* Too many crawlers (see note below re crawlers)
* Crawlers not being friendly
* Improper use of the crawled data
* Not getting compensated for their content
Why can't Microsoft retain Bing traffic when it's the default on stock Windows installs?
* Do they not have enough crawled data?
* Their index isn't very good?
* Their searching their index isn't good
* The way they present the data is bad?
* Google is too entrenched?
* Combination of the above?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#2000s–present:_P... (2019)
Here are some examples:
- Discord
- WeChat (is it the web?)
- Rednote
- TikTok (partially)
- X (partially)
- JSTOR (it finds daily, but you find more stuff on the website directly)
- any stuff with a login, obviously.
Damn, I can't stand open-source projects that host their "forums" on Discord. It's a nigthmare to use, it's heavy, slow, and it's completely unsearchable from the web.
I wonder what went wrong with our society.
Predators.
Meanwhile, users pay a premium to pretend they're not using Google
Fascinating delusion
My searches can’t be tied to me by Google for their ad targeting: this is worth paying a premium for, and I am glad Kagi are providing this service.
You seem to have a very limited understanding of the value Kagi provides.
- filter out results from specific websites that you can choose, - show more results from specific websites that you can choose, - show fewer results from specific websites that you can choose,
and so forth. When you find your results becoming contaminated by some new slop farm, you can just eliminate them from your results. Google could also do that, but their business model seems to rely more on showing slop results with their ads in those third party pages.
Just like mobile phone providers, third parties can provide lots of value add by reselling infrastructure. Business models can be different, feature sets can differ. This is not a delusion but the reality of reselling.
...
>We tried to do it the right way
This sign-up to retrieve better information idea will never take-off the way they think it will. A white label search will get you nowhere. They are silently failing because they're just too stubborn to do it the hard way. Kagi needs to pivot and succeed on useful and interesting edge cases first. Build us out a subject-relevant search, such as displaying vetted content from forums when searching a product/service, and then tying it into Facebook Marketplace for local items or services and Amazon for new. That is called building a product for yourself that others will use. Now you have your very own cashflow for clicks; use that cashflow to buy more corporate access, thereby proving you can succeed without any other search business propping you up and into relevancy. You don't need to start with the giants either. Start with something that works on local hunting, fishing, shooting, and knitting forums. When grandmothers need high quality green yarn today, make their muscle memory point to Kagi local, not Google.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681985
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546519
I'm going to send this idea to my legislators, the EU, Sam Altman, Tim Sweeny, and Elon Musk, et al., I just haven't had time to put this together yet.
Google is a monopolist scourge and needs to be knocked down a peg or two.
This should also apply to the iPhone and Android app stores.
Is this along the lines of what you have in mind - any other active efforts you're aware of that you think we should look into?
I've been meaning to write an RFC or open-letter of sorts to collect ideas for what a neo or parallel web could look like, but I'm just a nobody so shrug. It'll probably be something very fragmented and very very niche but nowadays I think that can be seen as a good thing.
But, there are already plenty of services that proxy Gemini pages so that you can read them in conventional browsers, as well as search engines for Gemini content.
That said, there are projects like Common Crawl and in Europe, Ecosia + Qwant.
I personally would like to see a search enginge PaaS and a music streaming library PaaS that would let others hook up and pay direct usage fees.
I tried. It's just not good enough. Quick example: yesterday I set up a workstation with Ubuntu, wanting to try out wayland. One of the things I wanted was to run an app (w/ gui) from another (unprivileged) user under my own user. Ecosia gave me bad old stuff. Tried for a few minutes, nothing useful. Switched to google, one of the first results was about waypipe. Searched waypipe on ecosia. 1 and a half pages of old content. Glaringly, not one of those results was the ubuntu.manpages entry on waypipe. shrug
But Kagi funds Yandex which fund the RU government, and I think it should be known to anyone looking to use it.
https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/07/17/kagi/
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
ChatGPT clearly demonstrated that displacing Google is possible. All previous monopoly arguments seemed even more flimsy after that.
While it's good that building other products is possible, it doesn't detract from the point that search engines are a de-facto monopoly.
Like shooting your opponents in the leg before a Marathon will surely improve your chances, but it doesn't mean you are the best out of them. This is like the very tenet of markets, reaching as far back as Adam Smith.
"Funnily" enough this requires some external system that upholds the rules of the competition, e.g. governments. That's why busting monopolies make sense.
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" dataset — because the upshot of offering this index for public good would break not just google's own monopoly but also other monopolies like android, which will introduce a breath of fresh air into a myriad of UX(mobile devices, browsers, maps, security). So, why don't they just do this already?
2. The other question is about "control", which the DoJ has provided guidance for but not yet enforced. IANAL, but why can't a state's attorney general enforce this?