SpacemanSpiff

They do have their own crawler and I believe supplement from bing only when necessary. Something like 98% of results are from their own index across all users. They actually have a breakdown for every search.

I think they actually have the largest independent index outside of Google/Bing right now.

Others that exclusively use their own index are:

Mojeek (results aren’t great)
Kagi (result are pretty good imo)

I think Google peaked about 6-8 years ago now and then started slipping at an ever accelerating rate.

It’s almost useless for me when searching anything remotely technical or otherwise niche.

I almost consistently need to go to the second page of results now, something I don’t remember doing since like 2009.

I find Bing acceptable. Brave search works well. But I’m actually using Kagi now since I’m hoping their paid model will actually mean I’m not the product.

This is really no different than Reddit. There have always been multiple subreddits for the same topic, with slightly different names. Many were created because the “originals” were found lacking at some point.

There’s nothing wrong with people having multiple options. We may eventually end up in a situation like Reddit where certain magazines/communities of the same topic are more trafficked than others and the less trafficked ones “die”.

I think there’s going to be a kind of lifecycle thing that comes with these things. They’ll sort of naturally sort themselves out. To artificially guide it one way or the other would be to imitate the mistakes of Reddit or past aggregate sites.