Given that their motivation for this is to find more sites and pages to index, it seems like it should improve the quality (or at least quantity) of results thanks to a larger index.

Hm, I may have judged too quickly then - I do hope this translates to better quality. Will wait and see.

Agree, I thought I was paying for search so they could focus on building search. Anything that feels like a money-raising or God-forbid acquisition play is concerning.

Agreed. Seems like web search implementation (both from Kagi and all its competitors!) could be almost endlessly improved upon, and any non-search feature is at odds with that.

Maybe there’s an argument that people who might use this, might also be people with sites that’d be valuable to index, and thus it’d both be nice for them and improve search for all users? :)