> you need the info before it becomes public.

and that's exactly how the Google engineer made money, right? He knew it beforehand, and once it was made public other people did too

Realtime access to internal Google search data may help you predict a lot of things that might be worth money, for example there's an existing market where companies buy usage estimation for competitors products (not though Google). I don't see why so many people are completely sure this information is worthless