[Disclaimer I work for Cliqz]

Copying, learning would be a bit more precise, and I'm not kidding. We do not answer queries 1 to 1, query-logs are used to build a more concise model of the page. It's not just a cache, we started like this, but we quickly learn to answer unseen queries.

A sufficient strict IP might find text snipped a copyright violation too. It's a trick area. Personally, I'm at peace as we get the content of web pages, as everyone else.

As for the dependency, it would be if we were not able to generate our own synthetic queries, which we are. So even if all other search engines of the world were to disappear, we would still be able to operate. That was not always the case, as you pointed out.