They explain a bit more about what that means here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave/75
TL;DR They use multiple sources for search results besides their own indexer, the most obvious one is Google. To lessen dependence on one single search provider they have been adding other sources, one of them is now Brave. That is the whole thing.
On Dec 26, Kagi started including search results from Brave search index, after we previously added Mojeek and Yandex earlier in the year. Brave has a public search api and we currently implemented it for about 10% of queries as a first test (same as any other API we use, there is no mutual development or anything of the sorts). This was announced in our Dec 28 public changelog. Approximately a week later on Jan 5 after several posts on social media about ‘Brave partnership’ the situation escalated.]
So, if you do not like to use Google in the first place, I don’t really understand why lessening the dependence on google would be a bad thing?
As someone that have worked in software for 30 years, and deplying complicated software, shared libraries is a misstake. You think you get the benefit of size and easy security upgrades, but due to deployment hell you end up using docker and now your deployment actually added a whole OS in size and you need to do security upgrades for this OS instead of just your application. I use rust for some software now, and I build it with musl, and is struck by how small things get in relation to the regular deployment, and it feels like magic that I no longer get glibc incompatibility issues.