> I’m pretty sure Kagi’s entire pitch is that they’re an alternate and original dataset. Theirs is the only search engine whose data isn’t based upon google or bing’s databases.

It's not. In addition to their own indexes the results include calls to "all major search result providers worldwide"[1].

There are independent search engines that only use their own index, like Mojeek[1]. Kagi is explicitly something like a search engine aggregator.

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm... [2]: https://www.mojeek.com/