I'm not sure I'm 100% articulate here, but feel that it's imprecise to call what Google to doing to produce search results an "algorithm". quicksort is an algo

I'm not sure I'm 100% articulate here, but feel that it's imprecise to call what Google to doing to produce search results an "algorithm". quicksort is an algorithm: the input and output are well-specified, and the algorithm is provably correct. Google's search engine uses 100's to 1000's of heuristics created by humans to generate the results. Is it really an algorithm? Yes, pagerank is an algorithm like quicksort. But the Google search engine uses pagerank as one among the 1000's of "signals" during result generation. Maybe people think Google uses only pagerank and that's why they keep saying that Google uses an algorithm.