I’m more disappointed by their decision to not consider Microsoft’s Edge and Bing as core platforms, even though the former is being pushed way too hard in Windows and the later is used as part of other search engines’ indexes (ie. DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Qwant)
Qwant actually have their own indexer, but even then I feel like Microsoft can push their own products as they want given you are free to ignore it… It’s not like there’s no alternative browsers, search engine indices or operating systems, and loads of other products are built off shared technology without it being an issue that it’s closed off generally
I think the core platform user threshold is a sensible way to determine core platforms. I don’t know if bing has so many users and what its market share is.
I think the situation with edge is different though, it should not be allowed to be forced down to windows users by bundling without allowing the user to decide which default browser to use first.
There are only like 4 actual search indexes online (Google, Bing, Yandex, and I can’t remember the 4th), and every other search engine just uses one or more of those for results.
I think Baidu, Qwant, Mojeek & Brave all use fully independent indices, but there are likely more. This is excliding eg. Kagi who use a combination of their own and other indices.
stract.com has their own indexer, fully open-source.
