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points by blissofbeing 2 days ago | 0 comments

I was surprised to find out Kagi and google results by default are very similar because Kagi uses google results, they have their own index too apparently but it's not used as much.

[–] wmchen 2 days ago

I knew Kagi was essentially a meta-search provider (they use lots of indexes to try and produce a more accurate search result), but wasn't aware they use a SERP provider with Google results. Uruky does and it seems to be offered upfront for users that want a more Google-like experience. I'm wondering where you found that out?

[–] ac29 2 days ago

They say "our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide": https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Google of course does not have a search API - Kagi is paying (IMO sketchy) SERP scrapers for these results. One of the reasons I canceled my subscription

[–] Brian_K_White 2 days ago

Thoughtful enough to care about scraping, yet not thoughtful enough to place the blame on google.

[–] eli 2 days ago

If you take them at their word, they would love to be able to pay Google directly for such an API. But I think it would take a government requiring it for Google to do it.

[–] gregwebs 2 days ago

It's sad that we have to pay a different company to do it, but it seems they mostly just remove junk or re-priorize Google results. Google is showing us results in a way that maximizes ad/click revenue for Google. Kagi is showing results in a way that maximizes the likelihood that you will pay Kagi for that search service itself.

[–] bear141 2 days ago

This makes it sound nefarious but isn’t Kagi maximizing for subscriptions synonymous with them maximizing a great product that returns the desired results for users?

[–] expedited123 2 days ago

They also use Yandex. https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio... , which is why I cancelled.

They have since removed all mentions of it and other names of the indexes that they use from their docs.

Basically you have no transparency and no clue how much of your money is going where. Could be that 80% of your results are Google index, 10% Bing, 5% Yandex and 5% independent indexes and you have no way of knowing.

That's why I switched to Uruky, where I have actual control over where my money goes. I mainly use EUSP, Mojeek, Linkup, Marginalia and if I can't find what i'm looking for only then go to a fallback search engine (that you can set inside) like DDG, Brave, Ecosia. There's a couple of other smaller open source indexes that they use (including their own).