I have been looking into and listening to podcasts about Kagi - the paid search engine and my understanding is they pay[1] for search partnerships/APIs so they can provide a meta search engine.
It reminded me and made me think about SearXNG. They do the virtually the same thing or very similar (meta search), do they pay for access to all the search indexes they use like Google and Brave? If yes, how? And if no, how do they access/scrap those search indexes for free?
Just curious, because SearXNG seems very comparible to Kagi (minus all the special added features) and it is free!
Kagi is using the official apis of the search provider, paying for their use and getting consistent service.
SearXNG is I believe just web scraping search engines without paying. Which especially for instances with lots of users means they will get rate limited by search engines.
You can see available engines on public instances here and some engines have blocked all of them. https://searx.space/
So kagi will have a lot more consistent experience
SearXNG now a days most of the engines for many instances are down they fix something and within few days or weeks it again goes down. 2 or 3 years before it were pretty good and search results were pretty good but now its not the same anymore its pretty bad.
You have to be careful about choosing the right instance because some instance may log the queries.