@VogueLaGalere@mastodon.online @eliasulrich@hachyderm.io The secret sauce is that it doesn't actually cost that much to index the web. On the site, he says that it costs $200 per month. Google just got there first, with better algorithms and better indexing. It was great through about 2010. Then the SEO (which was supposed to be secret but apparently all spammers know) and monetization kicked in. Kagi is another search engine, where you pay to use it without the SEO stuff.