Ranking an index is hard. It's not just BM25 or cosine similarity. How do you prioritize certain domains over others? How do you rank homepages that typically have no real content in them for navigational queries?
Changing the behavior of 90% of the non-Chinese internet is unraveling 25 years and billions of dollars spent on ensuring Google is the default and sometimes only option.
Historically, it takes a significant technological counter position or anti-trust breakup for a behemoth like Google to lose its footing. Unfortunately for us, Google is currently competing well in the only true technological threat to their existence to appear in decades.
not to mention that people mostly need wikipedia, the news, navigating the infuriating world of websites of big service providers (gov sites, or try to find anything on Microsoft's dark corner of the web), porn and brainrot
but it's awfully hard to make traction on a business that provides this.
FTA:
> Context matters: Google built its index by crawling the open web before robots.txt was a widespread norm, often over publishers’ objections. Today, publishers “consent” to Google’s crawling because the alternative - being invisible on a platform with 90% market share - is economically unacceptable. Google now enforces ToS and robots.txt against others from a position of monopoly power it accumulated without those constraints. The rules Google enforces today are not the rules it played by when building its dominance.
> The robots.txt played a role in the 1999 legal case of eBay v. Bidder's Edge,[12] where eBay attempted to block a bot that did not comply with robots.txt, and in May 2000 a court ordered the company operating the bot to stop crawling eBay's servers using any automatic means, by legal injunction on the basis of trespassing.[13][14][12] Bidder's Edge appealed the ruling, but agreed in March 2001 to drop the appeal, pay an undisclosed amount to eBay, and stop accessing eBay's auction information.[15][16]
> Google built its index by crawling the open web before robots.txt was a widespread norm, often over publishers’ objections.
As someone who was a web developer at that time, robots.txt wasn't a "widespread norm" by a large margin, even if some individuals "expected it to be respected". Google's use of robots.txt + Google's own growth made robots.txt a "widespread norm" but I don't think many people who were active in the web-dev space at that time, would agree that it was a widespread norm before Google.
Why would you tell G that you are doing something? Why tell a competitor your plans at all? Just launch your product when the product is ready. I know that's anathema to SV startup logic, but in this case it's good business
> Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.
edit: this is wrong
> Bing: Their terms didn’t work for us from the start. Microsoft’s terms prohibited reordering results or merging them with other sources - restrictions incompatible with Kagi’s approach. In February 2023, they announced price increases of up to 10x on some API tiers. Then in May 2025, they retired the Bing Search APIs entirely, effective August 2025, directing customers toward AI-focused alternatives like Azure AI Agents.
It's odd that Microsoft hasn't aggressively pushed for "openness". That's in the usual playbook for attacking a market leader.
(And then pull up the ladder once you've become king of hill.)
Microsoft will probably never topple Google, absent anti-monopolistic enforcement. But they can certainly attack Google's profits.
Going further back, AlltheWeb was actually pretty decent but was eventually bought by Overture and then Yahoo and ended up in their graveyard.
For everyone else it's the longer grind trying to gain visibility.
> Reducing its share from 90% to 80% may not sound like much, but it would imply a doubling in size of alternative sources of supply, giving China’s customers far more room for manoeuvre.
Google is a verb, nobody can compete with that level of mindshare.
Part of it is also the ecosystem - don't threaten adtech, because the wrong lawsuits, the wrong consumer trend, the wrong innovation that undercuts the entire adtech ecosystem means they lose their goose with the golden eggs.
Even if Kagi or some other company achieves legitimate mindshare in search, they still don't have the infrastructure and ancillary products and cash reserves of Google, etc. The second they become a real "threat" in Google's eyes, they'd start seeing lawsuits over IP and hostile and aggressive resource acquisitions to freeze out their expansion, arbitrary deranking in search results, possible heightened government audits and regulatory interactions, and so on. They have access to a shit ton of legal levers, not to mention the whole endless flood of dirty tricks money can buy (not that Google would ever do that.)
They're institutional at this point; they're only going away if/when government decides to break it up and make things sane again.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/31/archives/xerox-settlement...
People complain that user-agent need to be filled. Boo-hoo, are we on hacker news, or what? Can't we just provide cookies, and user-agent? Not a big deal, right?
I myself have implemented a simple solution that is able to go through many hoops, and provide JSON response. Simple and easy [0].
On the other hand it was always an arms race. It will be. Eventually every content will be protected via walled gardens, there is no going around it.
Search engines affect me less, and less every day. I have my own small "index" / "bookmarks" with many domains, github projects, youtube channels [1].
Since the database is so big, the most used by me places is extracted into simple and fast web page using SQLite table [2]. Scraping done right is not a problem.
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
Building a metasearch engine is not hard to do (especially with AI now). It's so liberating when you control the ranking algorithm, and can supplement what the big engines provide as results with your own index of sites and pages that are important to you. I admit, my results & speed aren't as good as Kagi, but still good enough that my personal search engine has been my sole search engine for a year now.
If a site doesn't want me to crawl them, that's fine. I probably don't need them. In practice it hasn't gotten in the way as much as I might have thought it would. But I do still rely on Brave / Mojeek / Marginalia to do much of the heavy lifting for me.
I especially appreciate Marginalia for publicly documenting as much about building a search engine as they have: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/
I started off with a meta-search calling out to Brave / Mojeek / Marginalia, and the basics of that are something that you can ask an AI to make for you as a one-file PHP script. I still think this is a good place to start, because you'll quickly find "okay, I can replace my everyday search engine with this". Once you're dogfooding your engine every day, you'll notice all the rough points you want to improve.
Once you've got an array of objects with Title, URL, Description, and splitting the URL into domain, TLD, subdomain, path, file extension... there's a lot of ranking you can apply just to those. Honestly, a lot of my "ranking" has just been applying increased rankings to domains that I visit most often. I have an array of about 600 domains that it applies ranking boosts to. You can try experimenting with your re-ranking there, before even starting to build your own index.
As for building your own (small, personal) index, the technical details are not as difficult as you'd think. An SQLite database file, that your PHP file reads, will take you a long way... especially if you enable FTS5 indexing. I only did that last week, and I should have done that at the beginning. Search times are 10ms, and not just on my personally curated index of 80,000 pages... I just added a 2nd database with 1.3 Million entries from DMOZ (the old Mozilla Directory), and it's still only about 10ms. My search engine now feels super fast when it gets results from my database. And when it finds zero results, it automatically falls back to the metasearch.
At 1.3 Million entries, the two databases are only about 550MB total. It's running on a shared hosting account and apparently they're not worried - but it's only available to me, so I'm only hitting it maybe 50 times a day maximum. I'll move it onto a VPS eventually, but every time I think "this must be using up too many resources", I find I'm thinking too small by at least a factor of 10x.
For getting started with PHP & SQLite, I found this blog post helpful - but at this point, your AI can vibe code the entire thing for you:
https://davidejones.com/blog/simple-site-search-engine-php-s...
It's amazing how far you can get with just SQLite and FTS5 and a little PHP. Read the Marginalia blog too, there's so much good information in there.
Don't hold yourself back, don't think it's impossible.
Exactly, why can't we just hoard our bookmarks and a list of curated sources, say 1M or 10M small search stubs, and have a LLM direct the scraping operation?
The idea is to have starting points for a scraper, such as blogs, awesome lists, specialized search engines, news sites, docs, etc. On a given query the model only needs a few starting points to find fresh information. Hosting a few GB of compact search stubs could go a long way towards search independence.
This could mean replacing Google. You can even go fully local with local LLM + code sandbox + search stub index + scraper.
Search indexes are hard, surely, but if you were to strip it to just a good index on the browser, made it free, kept it fresh, it cannot be 100 billion dollars to build. Then you use this DoJ decision and fight against google to not deny a free index to have equal rights on chrome you can have a massive shot at a win for a LOT less money.
I mean... Duckduckgo uses bing api iirc and I use duckduckgo and many people use duckduckgo.
I also used bing once because bing used to cache websites which weren't available in wayback archive, I don't know how but It was pretty cool solution for a problem.
I hate bing too and I am kind of interested in ecosia/qwant's future as well (yes there's kagi too and good luck to kagi as well! but I am currently still staying on duckduckgo)
The small distributed team grinding it out against the goliath. They are awesome and perhaps the right example of what a path like this would look like. Maybe someone from their team can chime in on the difficulties of building a search engine that works in the face of tremendous odds.
It's available in all major browsers (Here in zen browser, it doesn't even have a default browser but rather on the start page it asks between the three options, google duckduckgo and bing but yes if you press next it starts from google but zen can even start from ddg, its not such a big deal)
Duckduckgo is super amazing. I mean they are so amazing and their duck.ai or ai actually provides concise data instead of Google's AI
DDG is leaps ahead of Google in terms of everything. I found Kagi to be pleasant too but with PPP it might make sense in Europe and America but privacy isn't/ shouldn't be the only who only pays. So DDG is great for me personally and I can't recommend it enough for most cases.
Brave/Startpage is a second but DDG is so good :)
It just works (for most cases, the only use case I use google is for uploading images to then get more images like this or use an image as a search query and I just do !gi and open images.google.com but I only use this function very rarely, bangs are amazing feature by ddg)
Same here. It may be 'not very good' for highly specialized or complex technical questions ... but I do research across a broad range of (non-specialized) topics daily. I often need to find 2nd and 3rd points of view on a topic ... or detailed facts about singular events ... and I rarely need to go to the 2nd page. And all ad-free!
It's a remarkable education tool. A curious, explorative kid these days could easily sail WAY beyond their age group using DDG. I can only wish I'd had it.
Their recently added 'Search assistant' consistently provides a couple of CITATIONS to backup its (multi-leveled) responses (Ask for more, get more.) I've seen nothing like it elsewhere. It is even quite good at diggin up useful ... and working ... example code for some languages. Also with citations.
Google Search sucks not because Google is incapable of filtering out spam and SEO slop (though they very much love that people believe they can't), but that spam/slop makes the ads on the SERP page more enticing, and some of the spam itself includes Google Ads/analytics and benefits them there too.
There is no incentive for these companies to build a good search engine by themselves to begin with, let alone provide data to allow others to build one.
No, the customer isn't 'always' right, but these guys like to get big and once big, fuck you, we don't have to listen to you, we're big; what are you going to do, leave?
Even if they see it, it's a classic chicken & egg problem: it's not worth the time of the site operator to engage with your offer until your search engine popular enough to matter, but your search engine will never become popular enough to matter if it doesn't have a critical mass of sites to begin with.
Oh, almost never. That's exactly why search sucks now.
I have always wondered but how does wayback machine work, is there no way that we can use wayback archive and then run a index on top of every wayback archive somehow?
1. IIUC depends a lot on "Save Page Now" democratization, which could work, but its not like a crawler.
2. In absence of alexa they depend quite heavily on common crawl, which is quite crazy because there literally is no other place to go. I don't think they can use google's syndicated API, cause they would then start showing ads in their database, which is garbage that would strain their tiny storage budget.
3. Minor from a software engineering perspective but important for survival of the company: since they are an artifact of record storage, to convert that to an index would need a good legal team to battle google to argue. They do that the DoJ's recent ruling in their favor.
Google has a monopoly, an entrenched customer base, and stable revenue from a proven business model. Anyone trying to compete would have to pour massive money into infrastructure and then fight Google for users. In that game, Google already won.
The current AI landscape is different. Multiple players are competing in an emerging field with an uncertain business model. We’re still in the phase of building better products, where companies started from more similar footing and aren’t primarily battling for customers yet. In that context, investing heavily in the core technology can still make financial sense. A better comparison might be the early days of car makers, or the web browser wars before the market settled.
But if they were to pour that money strategically to capture market share one of two things would happen if google was replaced/lost share:
1. it would be the start of the commoditization of search. i.e. search engine/index would become a commodity and more specialized and people could buy what they want and compete.
2. A new large tech company takes rein. In which case it would be as bad as this time.
Like what I don't get is that if other big tech companies actually broke apart monopoly on search, several google dominos in mobile devices, browser tech, location capabilities would fall. It would be a massive injection of new competition into the economy, lots of people would spend more dollars across the space(and ad driven buying too) money would not accrue in an offshore tax haven in ireland
To play the devils advocate, I think the only reason its not happening is because meta, apple, microsoft have very different moats/business models to profit off. They all have been stung one time or another is small or big ways for trying to build something that could compete but failed. MS with bing, Meta with facebook search, Foursquare — not big tech but still — with Maurauder's Map.
Companies would rather sue than try and compete by investing their own money.
Microsoft had a chance (well another chance, after they gave up IE's lead) to break up Google's browser monopoly, but they decided to use Chromium for free instead.
Ultimately all these decisions come down to what's more profitable, not what's in the best interests of the public. We have learned this lesson x1000000. Stop relying on corporations to uphold freedoms (software or otherwise), becuase that simply isn't going to happen.
They chose to use Google with a revenue sharing agreement. Google is very well monetized. It would be very difficult for Apple to monetize their own search as good as Google can.
>they decided to use Chromium
Windows ships with Microsoft Edge as the browser which Microsoft has full control over.
Money. Google controls 99% of the adverting market. That's why its called a monopoly. No one else can compete because they can never make enough money to make it worth the costs of doing it themselves.
Also, competitive agreements: of the big players like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, Amazon, etc., only Google is in the ad business. But it has credible threats of digging into their businesses - GCP, Android, (not to mention software licenses and competitive access to e.g., Samsung), etc. So they agree to cede the ad world to Google, to keep Google out of their businesses.
The injunctions cannot be effective. Google ads are essentially a tax at a fine scale that rational people chose when it didn't change site behavior. But then Google ads changed the nature of the web itself, converting every snippet of information into an opportunity to monetize. Neither would change with a public search.org, and injunctions to license ad-free indexes won't change site behavior or publishers' self-interest in selling access to their content to Google alone.
Google knows the injunctions are unworkable and ultimately ineffective. The only question is what price they have to pay to the Trump judiciary to counter them.
Not too be pedantic here but I do have a noob question or two here:
1. One is building the index, which is a lot harder without a google offering its own API to boot. If other tech companies really wanted to break this monopoly, why can't they just do it — like they did with LLM training for base models with the infamous "pile" dataset — because the upshot of offering this index for public good would break not just google's own monopoly but also other monopolies like android, which will introduce a breath of fresh air into a myriad of UX(mobile devices, browsers, maps, security). So, why don't they just do this already?
2. The other question is about "control", which the DoJ has provided guidance for but not yet enforced. IANAL, but why can't a state's attorney general enforce this?