Search engines like Blekko miss the point

For some reason I saw a link for Blekko, a search engine that I remember trying back in the day so I did some research into it. Its another one of those San Francisco startups that is trying to compete in the search engine field against Google and in my opinion, is doing it all wrong. This is from their About page:

"Blekko's proprietary technology operates on a unique system that intersects our own original search index, Dynamic Inference Graph (DIG) algorithm, and editorial evaluation. Using the text from the Web stored in our datacenter, we distill the text and links down to a small semantic database, and use that database to map queries to a large list of editorially-crafted slashtag filters."

I often disagree with the push for Affero GPL licenses, but I really think that a search engine licensed under the AGPLv3 would really benefit the users. There's so many of these niche search engines trying to fight against Google (which has like 90% of the market) and they all seem to use outdated business models by going after angel investors, employing a lot of people in an expensive office, and keeping their code proprietary.

I'm also not talking about a YaCy style search engine either but something simple like what Startpage and DuckDuckGo are doing. Both of those keep their source code locked up and while they are private in comparison to Google, I bet many free software advocates express caution on what is really going on behind the scenes.

If the code is open and users can contribute to make a search engine for the people, what is the harm in that? The search engine could still make money by running ads and if someone wants to fork the code, improve upon it, and throw it up on another domain, then go for it. Competition encourages growth.