I don't see how this could reduce Google's "Monopoly". Searching with an API is the same as searching from the browser. how the results are going to be sorted:

I don't see how this could reduce Google's "Monopoly". Searching with an API is the same as searching from the browser. how the results are going to be sorted: garbage will be garbage, and should be demoted both in the API and HTML version. And of course, downloading the index is out of question. I think that a better way to improve competition would be reducing cloud computing costs (bandwidth in particular). But of course, regulators in USA would say that it is communism or something... Sigh.