Google should open source what actually matters: their search ranking algorithm

The notion that being 'committed' to open source means that a company should give away everything of value is ludicrous. Google came up with great software that makes millions of peoples' lives easier, and they have every right to keep it secret and profit off of it.

The zealous idea that open source and trade secrets cannot coexist is detrimental to the open source movement as a whole, in my opinion.

The analogy to "security through obscurity" is flawed. Open security works when there's an obvious way a secure system should behave, say, make it infeasible to open a lock/decrypt data without the correct key.

In Google’s, case the correct relevancy ordering of the web is a huge point of contention. So they cannot simply open it up hoping to close out all the holes in the open. It is also hard to distinguish acceptable behavior (linking) from unacceptable behavior (selling links) except in the aggregate through heuristics that assume ignorance on the part of the attacker.

In this sense, Google’s system is a lot closer to an intrusion detection system than a lock or a cipher suite. You want to establish some ground rules but there’s no added security in declaring what you’re monitoring on your servers and how.

Google's search ranking algorithm is their bread and butter so, I don't think they will ever open source it. But what always strikes me is that they have not yet open sourced their BigTable database systems even though, it's not their core revenue generating source. There are clones of BigTable in the form of Cassandra and HyperTable but it would be so much better if BigTable is open sourced.

An interesting thing to think about even though the basic reaction is "wait, no, that's their industry secret/revenue basis/whatever". Google is so dominant right now that maybe it's going to get to the point where, in the interests of the open web, they get pressured and lobbied to release their secret sauce; after all, as swombat points out, it's not just the algorithm by a long chalk.

It's especially interesting if you consider the origins of PageRank in academia, freely published and peer-reviewed, and still not that well understood by laypeople; would the open-sourced magic of Google even be understandable by that many folk? Those that do understand it could make a fortune as consultants; at the moment, shady SEO snake-oil salesmen are so prevalent and 99% of their advice is outdated or plain wrong, something that definitively calls them out on it could be helpful.

I don't get it, is the author talking about PageRank? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank What more does he want?