> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results

Crazy for a company to admit: "Google won't let us whitelabel their core product so we steal it and resell it."

Seems like an open question as to whether that violates any laws.

Another way to look at it is that if you publish a service on the web, you have limited rights to restrict what people do with it.

Isn't that the logic Google search relies on in the first place? I didn't give permission for Google to crawl and index and deep link to my site (let alone summarize and train LLMs on it). They just did it anyway, because it's on a public website.

What's the alternative? Building a competing search index as a relative nobody on the web is very difficult, from the outset, and is made more difficult from sites taking extra measures to stop bots in general now.

Google's crawler is given special privileges in this right and can bypass basically all bot checks. Anyone else has to just wade through the mud and accept they can't index much of the web.

Pretty standard business practice though. There's no ethics in making money.

Is it much different than what Google AI Summaries do?

Even the article posted (and search itself) has Google IP address.

But in this current climate, they can admit it and then dare Google to tell them to stop... After Google has just had an antitrust ruling against it for dominating the search market.

Google doesn't really have a leg to stand on and they know it.

Strange to pick on Kagi when there's much bigger companies on that list.