AV made a substantial unforced error at exactly the wrong time which resulted in a huge drop in search quality. It wasn't as much a matter of better algorithms

AV made a substantial unforced error at exactly the wrong time which resulted in a huge drop in search quality. It wasn't as much a matter of better algorithms as one might think. There's also a pretty big difference in scale. The AV team working on search in 2000 wasn't all that big.