> Keyword search is not that hard. Pagerank is not that hard.

George Hotz, is that you ?

Keyword search and pagerank had working solutions decades ago.

Hotz was trying to make a car controller that had never been done before, by himself, and then he wanted to """improve""" search with no explanation of what that meant that I saw.

I think if he was tasked with taking twitter from no search to "has a search" he probably could have managed it. A team of five people definitely could have managed it.

I think you severely underestimate the effort search engines have to put to filter out all the SEO garbage and come up with some sensible results

I don't underestimate the effort, I claim that it's not strictly necessary to have more than a couple people working on it for a minimum viable product, and less for a beta.