Anonymous Source Shared Leaked Google Search API Documents(sparktoro.com) |
Anonymous Source Shared Leaked Google Search API Documents(sparktoro.com) |
I understand some of this is a direct contradiction of things they have said in court previously?
I found it VERY amusing if you go to r/SEO just yesterday there were moderators and flaired users (you know, the elites of the SEO community, lol) insisting much of this was "debunked" years ago.
They of course deleted their posts, but the threads are still up. What a den of scammers over there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1d1eqjj/comment/l5tvfw...
https://www.reddit.com/user/WebLinkr/
I love how reddit is turning into the new SEO scam over night because of this stuff. Great work as always Danny Sullivan!
How these types first gain moderator status on a few subs and then the spam begins (picture of spam https://pixeldrain.com/u/a6qUPjTq )
I haven't been able to find a single legitimate expert in the entire sub, and I've checked about every flaired user and moderator.
You have lots of people like the above, or https://www.reddit.com/user/jesustellezllc/ that claim to run an agency in Frenso California called Ozelot Media, but when you look him up there's nothing. When you google "SEO" + "Fresno California", Ozelot media isn't even in the top 100 results. Lol, I thought that was the job of a SEO-type? Why let that stop the grift though?
What answer do the engineers at google working on this have for this violation of privacy?
I've directly seen people who have successfully manipulated search rankings by having logged-in chrome users search for a term, and then click on a given page. Works like a charm (though may not stick once the manipulation is done, unless organic users also prefer it).
Creepy.
"Well obviously it's your fault for not picking the 'Don't Be Cool' option on subpage 27b-6, duh!"
The confusing thing is the crime itself is small on an individual level. The question is: does it add up cumulatively if a small crime is committed against many?
Before that, you can make it audible: <https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller>
[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/tre...
Does anyone know more about yoshi-code-bot and how were these documents suddenly published?
Was it a script misconfiguration? A manual push? Something else?
Created 1,891 commits in 19 repositories
All 19 is under googleapis
This looks like a bot Google uses to publish their stuff on github and so likely it's a misconfiguration.
Then there's the relentless parade of "alternative browsers" that are just chrome skins - a period IE also went through - that intentionally try to trick people into believing they're not just using chrome but with less security engineering, and more scams.
Boosting "organic traffic":
- Brand matters more than anything else
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (“E-E-A-T”) might not matter as directly as some SEOs think.
- Content and links are secondary when user intention around navigation (and the patterns that intent creates) are present.
- Classic ranking factors: PageRank, anchors (topical PageRank based on the anchor text of the link), and text-matching have been waning in importance for years. But Page Titles are still quite important.
- For most small and medium businesses and newer creators/publishers, SEO is likely to show poor returns until you’ve established credibility, navigational demand, and a strong reputation among a sizable audience.
TL;DR: Clickbait + bot farms are the way to go. No wonder the internet is going to shit.
Notably, for people on HN, it looks like there is indeed an internal initiative to promote small personal blogs :-)
> smallPersonalSite (type: number(), default: nil) - Score of small personal site promotion go/promoting-personal-blogs-v1
For example, a small, personal blog might be great for solving a specific technical problem ("my dishwasher of model XXX has YYY problem"), but might be terrible for something like giving public health advice.
Java, is that you?!
> Omit internet tropes.
There was a brief period of time where I made decent money with it until Google deranked all the product review websites.
While bigger marketplaces have other ways of driving ranking
Haven’t had a chance to look at the API myself but the first impressions are that a lot of this was suspected by SEOs, but Google kept rejecting the ideas. Looks like clicks increase ranking for sure, which means click farms definitely have a legitimate business solution to offer.
I wonder about this. If I click a link and read it and I find that it's garbage (e.g. got ranked based on SEO rather than useful content) does it count as a successful click? Worse yet, some of these sites have blatant errors that are only discovered after examination.
This is relative to technical subject matter. Other searches, such as shopping may not suffer this kind of problem (or I have not noticed it.)
I also wonder how Google knows a click is successful. If I open a link in another tab, does the browser tell Google how long I lingered on the site? Perhaps Chrome does but I use Firefox.
What if I <ctrl><click> to keep the search page open and open the "found" page in another tab?
var words = query.split
var results = executeQuery( Select * from AdWords aw where word in query inner join adlinks al on aw.id = al.id return al.url, al.desc)
If (results.size < 30) { // todo call search engine }
Return results
Same service wrappers from two years ago: https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-php-client-services...
And yet the journalist included a screenshot with one of the weakest blurs I've ever seen... Why would you not excise the person's video portion completely? What good does it serve to have it included in the story? Even if that portion is faked, why would you offer potential signals like skin complexion, hair color, background picture, etc.? Why...
https://hexdocs.pm/google_api_content_warehouse/0.4.0/api-re...
This also explains why it's impossible for incumbents to unseat the winners in many search categories -- because they've literally been picked as the winners by humans at Google.
Looking at my Twitter/X feed, I also see an oddly similar dynamic. Certain accounts appear to have been manually boosted, showing up all the time -- whereas others posting even the same exact content will never appear.
Silicon valley will loudly tell you all about how wonderful they are at "democratizing," however, if you look under the surface it appears they're just hand picking the winners.
We don't know who you are, you are just a number in a database, and we don't even know what number, we just get the total number of visits for each website, not who visited it. It is like counting cars on a highway, not following your car. Plus, it serves the useful purpose of providing you with better search results, the terms and conditions allow it, and it can be disabled.
Similar to how insurance companies have offered voluntary, “anonymized” data dongles for discounts that are now being used (or at least revealed to be used) to collect data most often used to reject claims.
This is not what a clickstream is. A clickstream requires that the sequence of clicks be preserved, and preserving that sequence undermines anonymity.
It certainly is not "to improve the net or advertising" - that would be the lying part.
Google has done some good for the net, but the scales of their contributions slowly but steadily move to the negative side.
Basically if you believe lies you tell yourself, they tend to turn into truths in your mind over time. Even if you were doing it “ironically.”
Personal opinion about work at Google (still not googles opinion) I’m consistently impressed with how seriously this stuff is taken and the amount of work that goes into making sure that things like this sharing can’t happen accidentally, and that user choice is respected. The engineers on the ground are absolutely making sure this all works, and most of us care deeply about user privacy. I have personally worked both on implementing new features that significantly push forward privacy, and on implementing privacy controls for regulatory purposes.
I believe the law is violated when it's sufficiently profitable -- it just requires VP permission.
No public sources for this except Jedi Blue, the old anti-poaching case, etc.
I'm sorry but this is just wishful thinking. It might be what the spirit of the DMA & GDPR want but definitely not the reality thanks to inadequate or outright non-existent enforcement.
There are businesses out there whose entire business model and revenue stream are based on violating the GDPR. Not some kind of internal conspiracy or rogue employee, but the entire company is doing it in the open and the result of its doings (targeted ads or spam) are visible out there in the open for all to see.
Facebook, credit bureaus, data brokers, "consent management platforms", etc. All these companies' business models are big, obvious breaches of the GDPR. Yet, they are... still alive and kicking?
There is no chance that a concealed GDPR breach (whether intentional or accidental) will get addressed when the biggest intentional breaches are still allowed to continue out there in the open.
I suspect something very similar is going to happen with the DMA - Apple is already acting in bad faith but have yet to see any consequences.
The same answer you probably have for the millions of questions about what the things you do that some other people find offensive to their personal views and beliefs.
Quite a bit.
So much that now that I have what "everyone" asked Google for for years - that is blacklists - I hardly use them.
Why? Because with Kagi I get much better results out of the box.
I am fairly sure Googlers will tell me there are multiple safeguards to prevent the inclusion of Google ads from affecting ranking, to which I just have to say that the results speak for themselves.
Please note: I have only used Kagi for two years. I am only one user. But I am a user with 20 years of experience with Google and that got to count for something.
I don't know how people keep talking about it. The results, as you say, speak for themselves.
No matter what, whatever we ended up with was going to be shitty and exploitive.
I made my decision two years ago and I would probably do it even if it was just on par with Google, to support competition and to avoid supporting Google.
But in hindsight it is just exeptionally much better. There is no going back unless Kagi does something monumentally stupid.
I'm still happy to put my money where my mouth is and do pay for services which are genuinely useful to me. But this is not the kind of internet I imagined when growing up.
Then, now, it is like media before the 90s: you need to pay a lot of money to be in the center page of the newspaper.
But, hopefully we are talking about LLMs now, seems like one of the answers to search engines in general. Beyond AI, I see LLMs as a good evolution from PageRank.
A little bit general but lately I use the expression: "Complexity as Scam". Google always pointed to their "algorithms" and played with this term as if algorithms couldn't be adjusted to whatever you want to be. Initially the coined term was sound because it was based on a scientific paper and eventually it evolution but it seems like the PageRank original idea has detoured from being a "pure" graph algorithm.
Another context where I use "Complexity as Scam" is Web3. It is like Matryoshka dolls where there is always one more step of complexity to probe a point, but it never ends.
A barrier whose erosion has been well documented over the last 10 years.
Google and the ad ecosystem they acquired was basically the flywheel that spurred content creation at scale. Anyone could jump in, follow a few guidelines and earn a living by producing content on the internet. The Youtube acquisition and monetization followed the same pattern.
Over time the market consolidated and got less and less competitive: less platforms with complete control of traffic and one-sided revenue sharing agreements. The guidelines so to speak on how content should look and feel like were algorithmically made stricter and stricter until everything looks, feels, sounds and reads the same.
The problem right now is that the platforms are still tightening their grip, and it's all tied to the approach of using AI to replace the content creators on the platforms from Google to Spotify to Meta, and carving the spared money to shareholders. And while the web has been shitty for a few years now, we're now seeing a sudden drop in quality because the average user has no recourse or alternative, and neither does the average creator have the means of distribution and monetization (not just publishing, that's been solved) to even find, let alone meet the new kinds of demand.
I'm certain that in a few years this will even out: new search engines, new aggregators and new feeds will emerge, but the content - money - network problem triangle remains as a fundamental problem of the internet.
The internet is boring. And the trash is still there. Its just become reputable instead.
- Privacy
- Tree style tabsSure it isn't frequent, but it is frequent enough that once a day or so I have to open chrome to do something.
I don't consider it a problem to use two browsers at the same time, I usually don't to the same thing with them, so having separate profiles can be an advantage.
Note that privacy is not the reason why I am using Firefox. It is just that I think that knowing both is a good thing, and they are both good browsers, so why not? In some case, Firefox is better, in others Chrome is better, most of the times, they are interchangeable.
The only time it's a problem is when a site detects Firefox and won't display unlocked your using chrome or IE. I've only seen that a couple of times in the years since I switched back
It sends a lot of "analytics" and "tracking" to some of Mozilla's servers, but if you inspect the requests, those servers are actually behind Google's CDN,and Google does the TLS termination.
So... Google has access too all the data that Mozilla sends when it phones home. Some of it even has a unique identifying id.
It’s left a bad taste in my mouth since they used the work of others to get to where they are, then when others do the same, they don’t like it.
[0] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
I haven't looked deeply into Fishkin's companies, but I wouldn't expect either to be on the user's side when it comes to privacy. Both companies seem to monetize clickstream data and personal information from users who probably didn't give informed consent.
If the source was trying to get this information to a responsible journalist who cares about privacy, I have no idea why they'd approach a company (not even a news organization) who seems to fund the erosion of user privacy.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. During Rand's tenure Moz was a subscription business selling access to marketing analytics tools. Those tools focused on the structure of the clients' sites themselves rather than any analytics they might have consumed.
Source: I worked at Moz for several of those years, and helped maintain those tools.
Isn't this the same type of "swirl" blur that Interpol was able to reverse even 10 years back? With advancements since then you're basically handing evidence on a silver platter.
I'm not sure I would feel safe reporting stuff to journalists nowadays.
It's also clearly from Google Meet so... yeah. If he was worried about retribution (from Google, anyway) then they probably wouldn't have been using a Google service.
Or adding “top site” shortcuts on the Firefox New Tab page? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-items-on-fire...
[1] Or maybe can't be bothered because I stopped caring ages ago.
I think control-click is a power user feature that they just don't care to track. Average consumer is the target audience of the advertising...
And if you use it I am happy, that gives Kagi an incentive to keep it around.
I'm just saying that for me the results are so good out of the box that with a couple of exceptions I never had to block anything.
From the website about: "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
(Other standard lenses include
- Forums
- Fediverse forums
- Usenet/archive
and I think 7 others.)
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
Google search was taken over by an ambitious clique of failed yahoo managers that successfully destroyed their former company for their own financial advantage then did the same at google.
Acting as parasites on society at large.
Barring the ethics you can single handedly use such data to manipulate stock market, countries etc.
It’s just too much power
The logic does not follow. "A is required for B, B is bad, so A is bad" is not logically valid.
Much like inventing the wheel (positive) is a necessary precursor to both ambulances/fire fighting (also positive), as well as DUIs (less positive).
The larger point being simply that I find it somewhat disingenuous for those of us who consider it our job to think through problems from many angles to pretend we’re somehow unable to imagine the potential unfortunate consequences arising from our work, given the existing Powers That Be (meaning both entities and trends).
It might be that I rely a lot on precise queries and doublequoted words and also cannot get myself to use the conversational style that at least Google seems to prefer now.
Ad blockers will stop working on Chrome based browsers with Manifest V2 being dropped starting next week.
All Chromimum based browsers are in the same boat, Ad blocking will be severely degraded after Manifest V3 becomes the only option.
This isn't a secret, nor is it the smoking gun you seem to think it is.
[1] - https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-work...
The grandparent comment quoted the site's rules. I provided my opinion what is humor vs internet tropes.
I am happy for alternatives, otherwise I guess Kagi wouldn't improve so fast in areas I care about.
I think many people whose lives don't revolve around these things (as in your finances/mortgage are not dependent on google search) get weird magical views about search engines where it's sorta like a modern delphic oracle where the magic works as long as you believe in it. Of course I have the opposite problem where Google is angry chthonic god to be supplicated/scorned.
Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
Kagi is pretty clear about how they do what they do: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... You're half right, except that Google is not a vertical that they leverage for their index. Their solution works for me, but I'm also a techy. Anecdotally, my partner uses it, and she is not a techy.
> Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
The only way this statement applies (to me) is if you can optimize for Kagi. The only way I can think of to do that is organically, but admittedly I haven't put much effort into it because the magic of Kagi's flavor of search is that it puts me in near proximity to information density and sources that I already trust. The real proving grounds for Kagi are a decade out.
And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all.
Google researchers spend time ensuring k-anonymity (for reasonably large k) when using data.
In some way our interests define us more then social security number assigned.
De-anonymization would require linking that click stream with something that identifies the user, rather than the click stream. Perhaps that exists, perhaps not. GP didn't provide enough material to go that far.
Exactly because Google has these powers is why they have internal processes to avoid it. Of course there are products that use non-anonymous data, but this idea that everything at Google flows around with user-IDs for everyone to use and abuse is a weird stance. Google has a lot of internal auditing and validation systems when e.g. reading logs and doing feature extraction.
But I also got way more respect for Google's internal systems after I worked there than before, so I understand your scepticism.
Require opt-in by default. In all cases.
All PII data at rest must be encrypted at the field level. Like how passwords should be stored. aka Translucent Database techniques. Not just in transit. Not just encrypting the whole database. But encrypt the actual fields within a database.
Constitutional privacy means personal sovereignty over oneself. (A superset of the folk definition of keeping secrets.) Meaning any and all data about me is owned by me. Any one using my data for any purpose has to pay me. (See opt-in by default above.)
Exactly this. It doesn't matter that google doesn't "share" what they gather if they own so many conversion funnels from top to bottom anyway.
But why would anyone assume that? I think the position of many privacy advocates is that we're long past the point where it's reasonable to assume Google is acting in good faith in the best interests of its users. (Again, to be fair, this is true of more companies than just Google.)
Corporations measure success by one metric and one metric alone: shareholder value. Under our current system, a corporation that doesn't increase shareholder value is considered a bad company. Such a company is punished.
If Google can increase shareholder value by violating user privacy, and the consequences of getting caught won't reduce shareholder value too much, it's a bad company if it doesn't violate user privacy.
Of course there are mechanisms that slow this down, like laws and employees trying to follow laws, employee ethics, old guard culture, etc, but all will be defeated one by one for shareholder value.
You do realize the majority of people are completely oblivious as to why privacy matters as it relates to their data collection.
It's not that they're willing to do anything. It's that they're passive/apathetic when faced with vague prompts telling them about a matter they don't have insight on, after being bombarded by terms of service agreements, cookie pop ups, etc for years and years.
> This is a fair position to take, but assuming good faith all round, one that I think will typically be a minority.
If they were aware of privacy implications / exactly what's being collected on them and how that data is being used, then it's safe to say that they'd be the majority. Can't blame them for not taking the time to read into the matter either, as most outside of tech are wrapped up with a million other hostilities in their daily lives.
Defend it all you want, but it's just one more unethical thing screwing people over.
In fact your opinion is not a fact.
The right spirit is informed consent.
If I'm letting you scrape crash dumps and my browser happens to crash in the request where I send my credit card information to xhamster, that's one thing. Odds are that's never happened to anyone. It's another thing for you to guarantee that you're planning to record that information.
It's a more level playing field, and it's intrinsically more human-friendly.
Can you expand on how a card catalog improved the world? As a kid I used the card catalog a lot, both the physical version and the later electronic versions. Full text search definitely leads to pulling in information from a wider selection of sources.
I remember a lot of stratification of news sources pre-Google (which news channel you watched, which papers/magazines you read). Did Google cause reliance on one source of information, or does Google simply exist in a world where people tend towards echo chambers? How would Alta Vista have improved that?
i was lamenting the library recently and remembered how books were organized on shelves using the dewey decimal system
this meant that if you knew of one book that has something you're looking for, you can find all the _other_ books about the same topic right next to the first book, even if you knew nothing about the contents of the related books
I think the curious crazy tid bits are still there.
I have used Google since probably 2001-2002 sometime and a number of other search engines before. It is rather obvious to me and I have writing and screenshots from around the time quality took a dive that supports it.
Some startup websites I applied to.
Payment portals are a big one. Non-stripe or PayPal. But even there, if it's a new window payment flow, there can be issues on Firefox.
Kagi is kind of like Google in 2009, seriously good coverage, good ranking
... but also:
- more modern
- more features (summarizer, bangs like in DDG, FastGPT and probably a few I forgot)
- blocklists for websites (and also options to pin, raise and lower)
- with actual support: report a bug and you get an answer from a real engineer, a follow up when it is fixed and a shout out in the relevant release notes
- no tracking
If I were a rich man, I would probably keep my subscription just to support a Google competitor. Alas, I'm not, and so I'll be going back to Google.
While these situations could be a pg-style astroturf submarine, or they could be satisfied customers (the best kind of advertising), I wouldn't necessarily say fishy (you can look at the satisfied users' previous contributions to make that judgment yourself! :)).
Personally, I've not used Kagi, but I hear positive things from people I trust that use it. So I'll likely try it in the future.
Also, none of these accounts saying nice things appear to be bots or kagi-focused in any way, so I think it's safe to assume they do actually just like it.
The alternative is Searx and I may try it sometimes, but so far Kagi is cheap and very efficient for me (C++ coding and other languages).
What you call chrome skins isn’t a thing, people are building softwares on top of Blink, the rendering engine used by Chrome. The issue here is the risk of ending with a single rendering engine for the majority of the browser market, a diversity of engine ensure a good respect of web standards, that has nothing to do with privacy or security.
When you say “they just replaced IE”, that was >10 years ago…
They're just reselling google searches. With maybe 1% salted in from elsewhere for deniability.
Or at least I thought so?
But with Kagi you can always lower github results if you want to. Or boost other sites that you prefer.
I guess the identical search results in my niche are an example of convergent enshittification of both Kagi and Google then
Back then I think people mostly agreed that the results that ranked on top in Google generally were there because of criteria that benefited the end user.
I mean, even as crazy as Google results has been the last few years they have still managed to be better than Bing and DDG who both manages to have worse ranking and also like Google completely ignore my doublequotes.
That because there's a chance Kagi will become bad, there's no point in using it now and thus we should stick to Google, which is already bad? That doesn't make sense.
The same line of thought can be applied to anything. We don't know what will happen in the future, therefore we can't be sure that things won't go bad. Is there even a way to have such a guarantee?
Assuming I don't want to use Google (because it's bad) and I won't use Kagi or Perplexity or others (because they might become bad), what's the realistic solution? Roll my own search engine? I don't have resources and I don't trust the future me to maintain it.
If the way you make money is by convincing people to pay, you are highly incentivised to make the product good, especially where there are many other free competitors who are ad supported.
Well duh. Because it's the only value you're allowed to collect from retail customers without having to deal with either chargebacks or kyc.
We've deliberately made every other form of micropayment infeasible. It shouldn't be surprising that the only one left is insanely popular.
If they do become bad then at least I have had a fantastic search engine for another few years of my life like I had from 2002 until 2009 ish.
And also, already at this point, they and marginalia has proven that it isn't impossible to enter the search engine marked even now. This was long considered impossible, at least here on HN.
Even if they got 100 million active paying users it’d still be a tiny fraction of overall search traffic.
In the beginning, Kagi was mostly just API calls to Google and Bing AFAIK. Their results were still better for some reason, probably because they didn't have to consider how valuable the ads on garbage site were before throwing the site out of my results.
But I fear that if a large search engine copied some of Kagi's filters/lenses for non-commercial blogs & forums then SEO agencies would dedicate immense resources to polluting them.
People will target Kagi because it's packed to the brim with people who have $5-10/month to spend on a search engine, and likely have $5-10/month to spend on other things too.
I didn't on support requests, either, perhaps I should. I have before, and the team did a great job at addressing what wasn't working.
If that is true why hasn't Bing noticed it?
The github bias in google results is huge compared to bing. Just try running the same search on both sites. I find it hard to believe that the Bing engineers simply haven't noticed this.
>Kagi is known for delivering a unique flavor of high-quality search results, sourced from our own web index (internally named "Teclis") and news index (internally named "TinyGem").
The marketing at least is pretty good -- I haven't seen this many committed devotees since the iPhone was announced.
But here on the ground, I can type a few queries and reveal that Kagi is the same shit as Google. Perhaps you are seeing some manually adjusted queries?
P.S. there are lots of other concerns about Kagi too, I'm just talking about the search https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
Here on the ground in Norway I just say "lucky you" if Google serves the same results as Kagi.
My experience is Google expands my search terms beyond recognition and I am absolutely and utterly fed up with starting to read an article about a problem I searched for, getting a result from a trustworthy site, starting to read only to realize Google secretly behind my back expanded my search from "unpopular-ancient-javascript-framework-from-2021" to "currently-popular-js-framework-with-kinda-similar-name".
My time is valuable. Not having to babysit my search engine is something I happily pay for.
Could probably get my employer to pay for it too.
If Google by some miracle has you in an experimental group where they don't mess with your queries, or if you have time to babysit it - more power to you.
I am only saying Kagi is just as shitty as Google for my queries and certainly is using their index based off the 30 or so searches I made. I am not in a technical niche however, so maybe they're using something different for that or you saw a manually-adjusted query?
But for the regular, everyday people queries, yeah 100% it's just google bro.
What.
The point is that the fundamental problem is a company in a monopoly position throwing their weight around and/or keeping their product stagnant “because they can”, which is also a function of power. This is the “authoritarian government”.
The police part is referring to people thinking of specific IE6 technical issues “as the problem”, when it’s just a symptom of a larger problem.
Microsoft treated web developers badly because they could. Google will abuse the whole world in the same way now that Chromium has achieved near total dominance.
Kagi has a free trial, but you have to pay, which is the difference between it and early Google.
Of course, now we have Google ads instead, so who knows, maybe not bots.
I am definitely not a bot.
I am however extremely fed up with Google. And equally thankful that I have found something that works as well as old Google (or better).
You might lose some people, but probably not many - we've been conditioned to really accept ads everywhere.
Let me also clarify: I am absolutely not denying that Kagi uses Googles index.
I am just pointing out that for some reason when I search with Google I get lots and lots of results for things I didn't search for. For a while I kept them away by sprinkling doublequotes everywhere but the last few years, no amount of double quotes or even the verbatim operator works anymore.
With Kagi however not only does doublequotes work (for now at least), - I usually don't even need to apply them, my queries work just like they used to do in "old" Google back in 2009.
That is what I pay Kagi for.
I can be totally open that for what I know the reason might be as simple as the fact that Kagis API access gets results directly from Googles search API without passing through what I think of as a "search broadening" function and without applying A/B testing experiments to the results that come back.
I don't care. I get my results.
And if someone come along and present a better alternative that uses only their own independent index, I'll be inclined to pay even more just because I'd love to see it. (I was a marginalia supporter for months and might become again in the future.)
