> I suspect that if Google opened up their exact page ranking algorithm, the quality of the web overall would drop dramatically for everyone.
That's only because Google is a single point of failure. They have excellent engineers making their systems resilient, but relying too heavily on a centralised system inevitably amplifies those bugs which do slip through.
If Google's code were Free Software, there would be many much smaller, much less stable instances out there. There would be far more outages, but each one would be very minor.
Of course, a decentralised Google would be excellent. There are projects out there which try to do this.
That's only because Google is a single point of failure. They have excellent engineers making their systems resilient, but relying too heavily on a centralised system inevitably amplifies those bugs which do slip through.
If Google's code were Free Software, there would be many much smaller, much less stable instances out there. There would be far more outages, but each one would be very minor.
Of course, a decentralised Google would be excellent. There are projects out there which try to do this.