I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about Microsoft making their index public. Maybe among certain crowds like this, but what would it gain us? I couldn't just send a PR to help improve it; the only benefit I can see is transparency and perhaps a fun, maybe even useful visualization.
Also, the image of a "hip" Google competitor like Snapchat seems tremendously unappealing, personally.
> I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about Microsoft making their index public.
It's not just about consumers, but a plethora of other startups who can then use the index to build something creative on top of it. For e.g., you currently have bing/google customise certain type of websites with custom view for quicker access (IMDB, Wiki etc). However there is a limit a big company can be creatively about this.
Imagine a search engine where any user can submit a custom widget under a market place and consumer users can then install that as a plugin. For e.g., stock brokers can install stock widget, programmers can install document/stack overflow search and so on as a quick widget to see the top result without opening the link.. since it is community maintained, it will be proactively maintained by the community itself. That alone can topple something like Google if there is enough momentum (E.g. see VSCode overtaking Sublime text.) That is just one possibility. And it can also improve the search results as users may voluntarily come up to improve the result accuracy.
Other possibilities include voice based search, gesture search, integrated search within any mobile or smart watch app etc. With current licensing model, other startups have severe limitations in obtaining search results from the wast internet. This could explode and perhaps take over everything.
Ah, that makes much more sense now. You want to enable a community of plugins/widgets/apps built on top of the index. That's fascinating. I feel it would probably require some centralized base set of widgets similar to what Google already provides. That way the average user can just type "5 minute timer" without having to manually install the widget first. Quality/security outside that base set might be nightmarish. People put a lot of stuff into search bars.
May I remind you about when it was hip and cool to use Google? Google's tried to keep that image going as long as possible, but as a giant corporate behemoth, it's hard to realistically expect that to hold up forever.
Also, the image of a "hip" Google competitor like Snapchat seems tremendously unappealing, personally.