I see one graduate thesis, extended into a sparse handful of conference papers, then somehow converted into the holy grail of database technology: an index algo

I see one graduate thesis, extended into a sparse handful of conference papers, then somehow converted into the holy grail of database technology: an index algorithm which can be used as a drop-in replacement for B-trees, offering a 2-order-of-magnitude increase in performance with no downsides. What's that, you say? There must be some trade-offs involved? Well, sure, maybe...but you'll never be able to find out, because you can't look at anything other than said early research results without waiting for a sales representative to contact you. No downloads, real-world benchmarks, or testimonials from users == a pretty dubious set of claims, at least to these cynical eyes. I'm not disputing the fact that these guys may have an honest improvement over the state of the art for certain search tasks. If they do have anything close to the 50x speedups they claim for general MySQL workloads, though, why hasn't Google simply written them a check and stuffed their great discovery away with all of the their IP portfolio?