I am no expert on Google search, but it seems to me that "accessing the index" and "retrieving ranked results" must be one and the same. That is, the very struc

I am no expert on Google search, but it seems to me that "accessing the index" and "retrieving ranked results" must be one and the same. That is, the very structure of the index is designed around a particular ranking scheme in order to make accessing it computationally tractable. In light of that, how would one expose an API to offer access to the index without having something about Google's curation or ranking built in. A query API is clearly out because query responses include some results and leave out others, but even a dump runs into the problem that the data was collected, parsed, and structured with a particular scheme in mind.