Why does Google even need to know about your ladder? Build the bot, scale it up, save all the data, then release. You can now remove the ladder and obey robots.txt just like G. Just like G, once you have the data, you have the data.

Why would you tell G that you are doing something? Why tell a competitor your plans at all? Just launch your product when the product is ready. I know that's anathema to SV startup logic, but in this case it's good business

Running the bot nowadays is hard, because a lot of sites will now block you - not just by asking nicely via robots.txt, but by checking your actual source IP. Once they see it's not Google, they send you a 403.

Cloudflare’s ubiquity makes bootstrapping a search index via crawler virtually impossible, but what about data sources like Common Crawl?

Cost, presumably. From the article:

> Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.

Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft opened the bing index for all.

Don't they? DDG and Kagi use it. I would think you have to pay money but it does seem like they're willing to get partners.

edit: this is wrong

This is incorrect. Kagi does not use the Bing index, as detailed in the article:

> Bing: Their terms didn’t work for us from the start. Microsoft’s terms prohibited reordering results or merging them with other sources - restrictions incompatible with Kagi’s approach. In February 2023, they announced price increases of up to 10x on some API tiers. Then in May 2025, they retired the Bing Search APIs entirely, effective August 2025, directing customers toward AI-focused alternatives like Azure AI Agents.

Now that you mention it...

It's odd that Microsoft hasn't aggressively pushed for "openness". That's in the usual playbook for attacking a market leader.

(And then pull up the ladder once you've become king of hill.)

Microsoft will probably never topple Google, absent anti-monopolistic enforcement. But they can certainly attack Google's profits.

There's one great example of a company that did that and managed to go viral on their release, Cuil. They claimed to have a Google size of search index. Unfortunately for them their search results weren't good and so that visibility quickly disappeared.

Going further back, AlltheWeb was actually pretty decent but was eventually bought by Overture and then Yahoo and ended up in their graveyard.

For everyone else it's the longer grind trying to gain visibility.

I forgot about Cuil! I really wanted to like it.