A much lower volume of communication from Google on initiatives in the space (they used to talk endlessly about Panda, Penguin, etc). I hear that Google search

A much lower volume of communication from Google on initiatives in the space (they used to talk endlessly about Panda, Penguin, etc). I hear that Google search has largely moved to machine learning techniques. When I was there in 2005-2009 there was a bunch of hand-tuned stuff, and hand-tuning was definitely Amit's preferred strategy at the time. One side effect might be that a machine learning black box has fewer big, externally-perceptible shifts. It also just might require less ongoing interesting engineering work. Hard to say, though.