How Google ranks content is a black box: websites depend on search traffic to survive, and many will go to great lengths — and great expense — to beat out the competition and rise to the top of results. Better ranking means more website visits, which means more money. As a result, website operators hang on to every word Google publishes and each social media post by employees working on search. Their word is taken as gospel, which, in turn, trickles down to everyone using Google to find things.

This is the problem, and also why all centralized search engines will be tempted to go down the route of Google.

What is the solution? Maybe a decentralized open source index. But those exists and are not as good as Kagi. It seems there will always be a need for companies to pay skilled employees to create a good search experience. Just having the index is not enough.