The stated goal isn't to help other search engines; it's to get the community to help Google improve, for the good of all its users. The theory goes: if you le

The stated goal isn't to help other search engines; it's to get the community to help Google improve, for the good of all its users. The theory goes: if you let more people look at the algorithm, they can suggest better answers than Google alone, to thwart the spammers who are gaming the system either way. But I suspect the real goal has more to do with the deep suspicion that Google can or does do a significant bit of hand-tweaking. And these people want to force the algorithm into the open to either end or curtail that.