> Omitting the "almost" from "almost none" makes it sound disingenuously more absolute than it actually is.

Except that isn't what happened. Within the context, 'almost none' referred to size of the group, not to the amount of crawling.

I was discussing how much crawling is being done - outside of the 'almost none' sized group.

The 'almost none' sized group has 'their own results', so they do crawl. Based on that, the rest do not. Ergo, they do not crawl.

A search engine that never crawls seems non-intuitive.