> the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.

Crawling isn't the same as search. Crawling is just the very bottom of a proper search stack.

There's a lot of layers and a shitton of infrastructure to run and/or pay for.

Mind you, it's possible they actually did re-implement all the layers, but why would they when there are already lots of suppliers out there and they are all already chronically short on compute resources.

I'm actually very curious to learn what they actually do wrt Search.