When it comes to financials, Alan Rimm-Kaufman writing over at Search Engine Land thinks it should:
An Open Letter To GoogleDear Sergey, Larry, and Eric—
Think about increasing Google's transparency. Consider what your company would look like if you increased transparency maximally, turning the openness dial up to 11. Let your customers understand how you are selling clicks. Let your customers understand the clicks they are buying.
If you opted to do this (probably unlikely), and if you engineered your way around the substantial technological and business pitfalls (hard, but possible for smart folks like you), your remaining competition would fall like Carthage. Your shareholders would name children after you. And your advertisers would rise in unison for a standing ovation.
Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully—
Your Customers
One of the key factors I am tracing in this project is the opacity of the company itself. I can understand iits efforts to limit knowledge of how PageRank workd to thwart optimizers, Google bombers, and other disruptions to what the company seems to see as "natural" orders of the Web. But what of other aspects of the company? Is transparency good business?