Not a technical person, as I understand it, Google and Bing are full search engines while options like Seaexng, Ecosia, Duckduckgo are meta search engine that depend on Google or Bing. Are there other search engines that are fully independent, and if there aren’t, what are the barriers that stop other search engines from emerging
Kagi has independent indexes.
Kagi Search Sources( source ):
Kagi is known for delivering a unique flavor of high-quality search results, sourced from our own web index (internally named “Teclis") and news index (internally named “TinyGem"). Kagi’s indexes provide distinctive results that help you discover non-commercial websites and engage with “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.
We don’t stop there; we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative, which showcases content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high-quality content written without the motive of financial gain gives Kagi’s search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.
Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information such as Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other APIs. Typically, every search query on Kagi will call a dozen or so different sources simultaneously, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user in a split second.
Our unique algorithms down-rank pages with a lot of ads and trackers (which we have found correlate with a decrease in content quality) and promote content from independent, ad-free sources and personal websites. This ensures that Kagi shows results that delight users and are worth paying for. Subscriptions from our members pay for search results, allowing Kagi to remain ad-free and 100% privacy-respecting.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yes there is.
The biggest barriers is data/context. The biggest being the primary index.
Google has a lot of web scrapers/indexers and also offers hosting platforms. They also partner with big hosting companies for index trees to be able to easily show web sites reliably AND have been around for years finding it.
This is actually one of the primary damages that AI is currently doing to the internet field, because not only is it decreasing web traffic for web hosts due to AI summaries and searches, but it’s also forcing web hosts to have to block or restrict indexers. Because these same agents are abusing the user agent system to try to pretend that it’s a normal indexer, so web hosts are faced with either having their platform spammed so many bot traffic that it takes their website down, or block indexers, which means that they don’t appear in web searches. It’s a lose lose.
sanguinepar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Not to mention the damage it’s doing to content quality, as websites become increasingly written in a way that’s meant to optimise for AI placement, and are increasingly being populated with content written by an AI in the first place. Information, written by machines, for machines. It’s depressing as hell (and hard to see how it ultimately helps engage real actual people, who seem to be an afterthought sometimes).
Twoafros@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Thanks for this. Its very detailed. I heard abt Kagi but I thought it was a meta search engine, thanks for the clarification.
Thanks for letting me know about the barriers ad well and the current damage ai companies are doing. Hopefully, we’ll think of something to beat back the ai companies and Google