I have no knowledge or evidence, but this has indeed become my mental model for whatever Google actually does these days. I do wonder what they actually do. All

I have no knowledge or evidence, but this has indeed become my mental model for whatever Google actually does these days. I do wonder what they actually do. All those engineers, for 20 years. Surely they haven't just been scaling up BackRub! But I find it very hard to believe that they're crawling the whole web. I find it very hard to believe that PageRank is still the same PageRank that we understood in 1998. And it looks like they're managing to editorialize quite heavily, even if they're doing it via algorithm somehow. But again, I can't really discern what they're doing anymore. So for now, I have to disagree with the "garbage in, garbage out" theory. I don't believe Google has the same goal now that they did then.