If I understand it right, it's not exactly the same algorithm. It's Pagerank, with lots more features and weights than in the past, run first. Then quite a lo

If I understand it right, it's not exactly the same algorithm. It's Pagerank, with lots more features and weights than in the past, run first. Then quite a lot of bolted on ML passes afterwards, each specialized for something different. One to suss out low quality content, one to identify low quality incoming links, one to boost the effect of brand/authority, and so on...many many more of these. Which apparently worked well for quite a long time, but also dangerous over time because you don't really know why something now ranks well, or doesn't. The best you can do is have human raters score various searches, tweak a bunch of weights/knobs, and try over and over again. Meaning, perhaps it's not that the internet is too big, but that the overall model is too big and disjointed to manage well. Also, if you're on this team, you're competing with the ad side that's continually pushing the organic results down the page, where they matter less. A lot of fussy tuning around "quaint hotel in Paris" seems wasted when the end user is 3 scroll events away from the organic results.