Lots of bloggers are commenting about this thread at Digitalpoint on why Google's algo has never been leaked. My take on the algo - it would barely help if it was public knowledge. Yes, we'd all sit down and analyze all the cool things Google can detect about trust and gaming and spam and manipulation... and then? Then, we'd go back to work trying to dream up good content and clever marketing plans to have our content receive links.

I'm not saying that there would be no room for clever spammers to build out some automated systems that might function for a few months or even a year, but they update that puppy pretty frequently. The only real value would be MSN, Yahoo! & Ask, who could use it as competitive intelligence. I guarantee that no matter how much you think you could make on the leaked Google data, those companies would find it far more lucrative.

It reminds me of a dialogue Rebecca, Matt & I had once joked about:

Matt: It's ours! We've stolen the precious Google algo from the 'plex.
Rebecca: Yeah, with our newfound knowledge, we can rule this puny Internet!
Rand: OK, wait - let's examine it and see what we need to do.
(six months of IR research later)
Rand: Aha! I've got it!
Matt & Rebecca (in chorus): What, what is it?
Rand: Links! We need links.

Last point of interest - if it ever was leaked... How would we know about it? Maybe it was leaked in October of 2004 and was the impetus for the infamous Florida update. Maybe the sandbox grew out of a leak. If you had it, would you really share with the whole world?

Honestly, at this point in the SEO game, it pays to be a great business strategist, a creative content developer and a phenomenal marketer far more than an analyzer of algorithms (and this is coming from the guy who spent nearly the whole of summer '05 reading nothing but patent apps and IR documents).