I just asked Antigravity to clone the repo to look to see if it might have leaky code and it flat out refused three times in a row to even clone it. It would seem the snake is eating its own head.
tl;dr for people who just read the inaccurate quote: It was the default search provider (for free), if you configured anything else, it was not used. They removed the default.
Basically: it is a free service, free is good, why are you being difficult?
People running Hermes on local models thought their data was theirs, but what if the model is not the only leakage vector??