There are plenty of talented people working on ranking and webspam too.<p>There&#x27;s a limit to how parallelizable those problems are.  At some point, more people working on an algorithm doesn&#x27;t make it faster or better, it just makes it more confusing and worse.  Mythical Man Month applies as much to Google as it did to IBM.  And so you might as well put people onto optimizing the rest of the page as well, because they&#x27;ll do more good there than having yet another cook in the ranking algorithm kitchen.  (I&#x27;d argue that there are too many people working at Google in general...I left, so I&#x27;m no longer contributing to that problem.  But then, there were probably too many people when I joined, so I contributed to it for 5 years.)