This is the very early signs of a trend that is going to grow - the conversion of private conquest of the Internet into public goods.<p>Google has two huge advantages in search - they have scraped links off every web page, which can be replicated (see Bing, DuckDuckGo) and they have user behaviour visiting those pages (did they immediately return to results page after hitting ,#1?)<p>There are good arguments to be made that both data sets are public goods, and indeed that it was unfair to use user generated content &#x2F; data without licensing<p>There are of course arguments to the contrary.  but googles jewels are too valuable to be left alone for lomg