I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
No, that isn’t how it works by any stretch of the imagination. Kagi has its own search index.
Last time I checked they admitted just being a metasearch engine. That their own search index was unusable. Which would be reasonable as a reliable proper search index is incredibly expensive.
I just checked their website, I don’t find references to their only using their own search engine. In fact they seems to be switched development to AI tools (that I would bet that they are just chatgpt API wrappers).
They also stated having like 20.000 customers. With that money and based on California there’s no way they have the ability to do any core development besides API wrapping other commercial services.
Some people asked for source: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Fron their own web:
They try to downplay it as their whole bussiness model is “we are not google search” though it’s pretty obvious that they don’t have the resources to create a functional search index of the whole web. Most of their results are filtered metasearch and that can be self host without paying a subscription.
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