> I am glad there's alternatives to Google and Bing.
Kagi is just Bing under the hood with an OpenAI summarizer and a lot of tuning. It is fully reliant on the quality of search results it can fetch from Bing's databases.
I know there exists Qwant (a french company) which claim to have an independent engine, but they keep turning their Bing backend on for a lot of searches. Only truly independent engine from Google/Bing with relevant results that i know of is Brave Search. Not a great company, but they do know how to make a good search engine, and are practically alone in the space fighting against the Bing-based alternative search engine business model.
I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps the majority), but I think it's inaccurate to say that Kagi is just Bing under the hood:
> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing and vertical sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
> I'm not sure what percentage of the results are Bing (perhaps the majority)
Zero right now (we dropped Bing completely after their API price hike). We need to update the documentation to reflect this, thanks for pointing it out.
I think the (open) web is troubled from a content, quality and funding perspective.
The old web was the volunteer web. People produced useful content and it was interesting (Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and delicious)
I like reading personal tech blogs from the volunteer web. I get a lot of value from them.
I don't want the web to get worse so I subscribe to Wikipedia and at one point medium.
I kind of think the secret to quality is to commission high quality authors.