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
Yes there is. Kagi is probally the most well known I can think of, and even that still uses Google and Bing as secondary sources.
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 sadly also 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. Which is making it even harder to establish search platforms. 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.
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).
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