Similar experience here, for what it's worth, though I didn't get as far as you. I basically just stopped and didn't bother - it was easier to go through OpenRouter than spend more energy on it.

Also:

> Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first

So much this. I'm currently grandfathered in until the end of the year on Google's Search API, but the $35,000 they want to continue usage of my < 1000 personal searches per month, not going to happen. It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.