Yes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.
As someone who uses Kagi, I think it is absolutely not accurate to say they are a search engine rather than a meta search engine. Most of their results come from the other engines you listed.
As per the first sentence on that page, they do. It's just not their only source, and from my experience it is far from the main source. You can see "% of unique Kagi results" on each search; these are the results from their own index.
Kagi's main results come from Google actually.
(edit: see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html - Kagi really shows how good Google could be, since it's mostly using the Google index and then doing user-friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)
I could be wrong, but I think they're playing to their early adopter audience, that being tech workers.
Google is terrible at tech searches, without verbatim and now "web" search. Kagi spending work in this area, and indexing this area, might bear good fruit.
Just tried it and it led me to a 403 error page: “Sorry your network appears to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time.”
Are you sure about that? It doesn't completely rely on it but didn't it use bing as one of the search providers? I'm probably completely wrong and my info is outdated but I'm asking because it would be pretty special (in a good way!) if they use their own index exclusively.
Qwant was not usable yesterday during the Bing outage so that pretty much shows they cannot function without Bing (even if they do have some auxiliary indexes of some sort)
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...