[danielbarla]

That makes sense, though I think there's still a large difference between the virus detection and ranking algorithm comparison. The entirety of the virus detection code is running on the client's PC; surely it can be reverse engineered and understood fairly successfully?

The same can't really be said of Google's algorithm, as it's essentially a hugely complex black box, and you can barely interact with it. That's kind of like reverse engineering a chip purely using its inputs / outputs.