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Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi has done a great job of solving

Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi has done a great job of solving some of the UX and privacy problems endemic in online search these days, but at the end of the day they could be snuffed out at the whim of the big search providers (Google, Bing) if they decide to kick them off until they can get their own indexing solution off the ground. If an alternative search engine reached Bing's level of popularity, this would undoubtedly happen. The same goes for DuckDuckGo and others. All of the above use the Bing search API for the majority of their web results which for most use cases is not economically sustainable. I do think there is a large swath of users who will pay a subscription for a truly great search engine offering, but indexing has to be at the core of this offering, at least for me. If users realized this is just Bing results with a few enhancements and additional result sources mixed in, they might not be as willing to pay for what they could technically get for free elsewhere, albeit with significantly less privacy. That said I wish Kagi all the luck in the world. As the original dev who planned out and built the initial backend implementation in Crystal and put together their early engineering team, I can at least say they are building on rock-solid, very fast and privacy-oriented foundations, and this is a truly web-scale product in terms of the infrastructure design.

guntars 5y ago
Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier now than it was in the early 2000s. It's the ranking that's the hard part. PageRank helped put Google on the map and they've battled the hordes of low-ethics SEO practitioners ever since. I think it's generally agreed that PageRank wouldn't cut it today. I tried Kagi as the default search engine for a few days and realized just how many little things Google does that I prefer, but never noticed until now. Not strictly related to search results, but things like converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. It's a ton of work to implement all that. For now I switched back, but I'll keep an eye out.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  > converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. Honestly I’d be happy with a search engine that does search well, and use dedicated tools for the other widgets. I think browsers could do a better work at using the omnibar as a command line tool to cover these cases. For instance I’d really wish it would be easier to map incantations like “/mtg intl” and have a predefined action executed. Bookmark keywords are already half the way there.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  > Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier now than it was in the early 2000s All the more reason for any serious competitor to try to do it themselves, yet no one does.

guntars 5y ago

Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier now than it was in the early 2000s. It's the ranking that's the hard part. PageRank helped put Google on the map and they've battled the hordes of low-ethics SEO practitioners ever since. I think it's generally agreed that PageRank wouldn't cut it today. I tried Kagi as the default search engine for a few days and realized just how many little things Google does that I prefer, but never noticed until now. Not strictly related to search results, but things like converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. It's a ton of work to implement all that. For now I switched back, but I'll keep an eye out.

makeitdouble 5y ago
> converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. Honestly I’d be happy with a search engine that does search well, and use dedicated tools for the other widgets. I think browsers could do a better work at using the omnibar as a command line tool to cover these cases. For instance I’d really wish it would be easier to map incantations like “/mtg intl” and have a predefined action executed. Bookmark keywords are already half the way there.
sam0x17 5y ago
> Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier now than it was in the early 2000s All the more reason for any serious competitor to try to do it themselves, yet no one does.