Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
by jsnell on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @10:18AM
(#30086513)
If they were just illegitly scraping results, they could not provide any kind of consistency in quality as they would be getting blocked on and off. And the small search engines like DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc have been making these kinds of deals for more than a decade and with more users than Kagi is likely to ever have without having their contracts terminated due to "too much traction".
That being said, even if they did pay if they have any traction at all they’d still be blocked. Why would their competitors help them?
In any case I doubt it will take off, people who are poor aren’t going to pay 10 bucks a month just to search when there are dozens of free competitors.
Happy to be proven wrong.