Cliqz entire history was based on this kind of thing, milking off other search engines by just deducting their ranking methods, it's parasitic. There's no cleverness about it.
Google owns 95% of the market in most Western markets. There's no "blatantly false" about that.
They scrape search engine results and present them as their own.
Do 10,000 searches on Google and Brave and you'll see how similar they are. It's as simple as that, scraping by sleight of hand.
Why can't they be a normal search engine - because they need to scrape others. Simples.