They have their own index on top of using Google’s. As such they do some of their own ranking like promoting the “small web” and surfacing more Internet blogs, for example. You can also customize results rankings by domain – for example, when I search for an image I’ve personalized it to block social media results, Pinterest, and AI-generated images (they tag AI images and they’re reasonably good at it).
The end really is that I can have confidence that my results will be relevant from the first result – no sponsored content, no ads, no unwanted AI slop (you need to purposely invoke AI summaries, for instance, by ending your query with a question mark), and no domains that I find give low quality results. There are even more customizations you can do and I could wax poetic about Kagi, but at the end of the day a good search engine helps you find useful information and gets out of your way, and I haven’t seen a search engine do that better than Kagi yet.
Likewise married into a Latino family. They acknowledge that “Latine” is a thing, but not a single one of them has heard another Latino use it in real conversation, let alone use it themselves. And they all roll their eyes extra hard, young and old, at “LatinX”. The family that speaks English all poke fun at it by pronouncing it “Latinks”.
I’m sure that some population of Latinos somewhere in the world cares about such things, but white people on the whole seem to be care a whole heck of a lot more.