I'm not OP but my guess is that without the revenue generated by the proprietary algorithm, there wouldn't be enough money or incentive to keep improving it. W

I'm not OP but my guess is that without the revenue generated by the proprietary algorithm, there wouldn't be enough money or incentive to keep improving it. With an open source google algorithm there would be possibly 1000's of lesser google's (lesser as in inferior search) the lesser googles might even get eclipsed by Bing or some other proprietary search which has the resources to improve it's search.