I have no idea why they would do this

I do. For the same reason they are cramming LLMs into every other product:

They need to pretend to their investors that there is an enormous market hungry for more of this, so the investors will not demand their money back.

By turning more users of existing services, into “users of Gemini”; by turning more translate requests, more email messages, more search requests, into a “Gemini usage”; they can with a straight face claim more and ever more usage and demand, propped up by users who never agreed to any of this.

From TFA:

So what do we search with instead of Google? There isn’t a lot of choice. There’s various flavours of Google or Bing.

[…] Kagi resells Google’s actual link results for a monthly subscription. Kagi is really an AI company that sells search as a sideline, and they’ve got a terrible AI slop news service too. But the search has a good reputation for now.

I went to the landing page, expecting garbage genAI images; it did not disappoint.

Good news every time this happens.

Even better, this blog post is a great reference of the many reasons GitHub is shitty, becoming shittier, and everyone should abandon that platform.

GEMA versus OpenAI. Whoever wins, we all lose.

But I’m still happy to see them fight.

So many of the criticisms here survive essentially unchanged, fifty years later:

If he calls the main loop of his program “UNDERSTAND”, he is (until proven innocent) merely begging the question. He may mislead a lot of people, most prominently himself, and enrage a lot of others.[…] If Quillian <1969> had called his program the “Teachable Language Node Net Intersection Finder”, he would have saved us some reading. (Except for those of us fanatic about finding the part on teachability.)