&gt; would it be correct to say the issue is Google isn&#x27;t releasing their new data for free?<p>How about: Google shut-down a knowledge-base that was curated by a community, that provided regular data dumps, an online interface and an API - all with an open license (the original data source is nevertheless Wikipedia et al). Google&#x27;s new venture is basically the same core technology and data but the crawler run also over the scrapped web content. And the only access for non-Googlers is via an API. Make your own conclusion from that.