Google has by now put 8 million US patents and 3 million patent applications on line link here. In addition to describing what it is doing, it sets out its objective in doing so thusly:

"As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we're constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patents, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you."

Google has had its own issues with patents. Like much of the rest of the software industry, it avoided filing for them for some years, but competitive patenting has taken over the industry in the drive to gain a monopolistic advantage or prevent others from doing so by establishing a patent pool to force cross licensing. By making it easier to challenge applications and even granted patents, putting them on line should make bad patents rarer. The problem of identifying and proving prior art remains.

John Bennett Quote:

"Like much of the rest of the software industry, it avoided filing for them [patents] for some years"

To be more precise, from the time Google filed for incorporation in September 1998, they avoided filing patents until March 1999, which appears to be the date they filed their first patent application, which became U.S. patent 6,678,681. So I infer from this that "some years" is equal to six months.