Comment by hocuspocus

After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.

If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.