Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

Kagi’s data sources and reliance on Google

• Commenters infer Kagi is effectively using Google SERPs via intermediaries like SerpAPI, alongside other sources (Yandex, Marginalia, its “small web” index, etc.).
• Some see the blog post as pre-emptive damage control if SERP providers are cut off; others note prior Kagi statements about “Google API access” now look misleading or at least ambiguous.
• There’s debate over how much of Kagi’s value is “repackaged Google” vs its own ranking, filtering, and UI layer.

Privacy, ethics, and legality

• Users highlight that even with Kagi’s privacy promises, queries ultimately hit Google and fall under Google’s data practices (e.g., Trends), albeit without direct user identifiers.
• One camp calls this “stealing and reselling” Google results; others argue it’s standard scraping/metasearch, analogous to what Google itself does to the open web.
• Legality is seen as unclear: robots.txt, ToS, and scraping case law are contested and evolving.

Google’s dominance and antitrust remedies

• Many argue Google’s 90%-ish share is not just “being good for users” but a self-reinforcing monopoly sustained by default deals, tracking, and interaction data (clicks, dwell time, etc.).
• The DOJ remedy to force Google to offer index access “at marginal cost” is seen by Kagi supporters as essential infrastructure access; skeptics say “marginal cost” is underspecified and the real moat is user behavior data.
• Some propose a shared or nationalized index, or strengthening Common Crawl/Internet Archive, to end redundant crawling and “AI scraping” arms races.

Feasibility of building new indexes

• Repeated points: fresh, comprehensive indexing is extremely expensive; non-Google crawlers face bot blocks, Cloudflare, and publishers whitelisting only Googlebot.
• Others counter that smaller, more opinionated indexes (Marginalia, “small web”) can be valuable without “indexing everything,” challenging the assumption that only “a second Google” matters.

Search quality, AI, and user experience

• Many say Google results have worsened (ads, SEO spam, AI summaries), while Kagi is praised for decluttered SERPs, domain blocking/pinning, and optional LLM summaries.
• Some are satisfied with DDG/Bing; others report frequent “!g escapes” from DDG but rarely need Google when using Kagi.
• Concerns appear about Kagi’s use of Yandex (indirectly funding Russia) and fear that Kagi might eventually adopt ads despite its current subscription, ad-free positioning.