It is a valid proposal. Google is not just selling you a search algorithm with their google.com platform, but also the server infrastructure that maintains it,

It is a valid proposal. Google is not just selling you a search algorithm with their google.com platform, but also the server infrastructure that maintains it, the brand name (a vast swathe of less tech savvy Internet users say google X instead of go to X website), and the uptime. Yes, the algorithm constitutes a portion of their value add, but if they open sourced google.com on its own they would not see their business destroyed for it. Would Bing suddenly become a lot better? Certainly. Would people start using Bing over Google if it just became as good as Google search? Certainly not. The only candidates that might take market share are DuckDuckGo and StartPage, who preach privacy and thus a lot of users (including myself) prefer them despite their poorer search results. If they could get Googles algorithms, they would produce better results and probably steal market share. How much market share? 1%? Do privacy savvy searchers even constitute 1% of search traffic now? Yes, it is absolutely a bad business decision for them to publish their source. They are much more likely to lose money than to see third party contributions to their code make their search so much better they offset the cost of everyone having access to the same quality search. But I still postulate it would not be much revenue and market share, and that there are tremendous applications for extremely sophisticated search algorithms like Googles that could produce tremendous economic prosperity for other disciplines, and I imagine their work might be applied in completely unrelated industries for other search domain problems. Their algorithm is ultra-specific to web page indexing, but I'm sure in that Goliath beast of code there is some novel ingenuity that we are missing due to its closed nature.