I don't think Kagi is heading in a necessarily "bad" direction, though I don't agree with it, and I also think there's value in a product that's solely focused on private and personal search, that doesn't have to be as expensive, expansive (Drive, Maps, Email, etc.) or big (team and resources-wise) as they are.
I hope that makes sense!
Could you share more info about how you're building it? Like Kagi it wraps / reuses multiple other providers? How do you do that affordably, and how do you merge the results together into a good answer?
Initially we called all search providers and merged the results in a round robin fashion (so first of the first provider, first of the second provider, first of the third provider, then second of the first provider, second of the second provider, and so on), deduplicating them, but this was becoming very costly and inefficient once we had 3 and more search providers (most providers will return results within 500ms, but not infrequently one would take up to 2s or more — we timeout there, so I don't know if it'd take much more —, slowing everything down), so now we give everyone the choice of which providers to use first, and we pick results from the first two (we're actually considering switching to just the first, as costs are still a bit high and we don't want to increase pricing).
I hope that provides some more clarity! Happy to answer any more questions.
Is Uruky using Yandex?
One bit of feedback from me, take it or leave it, but the name doesn't feel appealing or memorable. What does it mean?
There's no specific meaning, though I can't say I dislike the close name matches with Uruk-hai [1] and Uruk [2]! :)