[bogwog]

I really like his idea for making Google's search index a public commons. Google search is by far their most popular product in terms of traffic, it's one of the most controversial and easily abused, and it's not even their main revenue stream. Google can survive without search, and the internet would be better off if there was more competition.

The only issue I see is how would you make sure other smaller companies aren't providing biased search results too? His idea for having a monitoring system sounds like a privacy nightmare for users. At least you can regulate the hell out of Google and have actual audits. Doing the same for thousands of search engines isn't easy.

[UncleMeat]

The index isn't the hard part, it is the ranking. The proposal also makes basically all forms of anti abuse impossible.