> If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out? This might be a bit of a silly take, but this is basically what my experience wit

> If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out? This might be a bit of a silly take, but this is basically what my experience with search engines sometimes is like. I might spell something the wrong way, or try to describe what I'm looking for in ways that aren't entirely correct, or even attempt to solve the wrong problem, but end up with the correct results anyways. A lot of it is due to human generated content, no doubt (like someone explaining that a person probably wants to install a different software package to achieve a desired result instead of using another incorrectly), but there's definitely something nice to be said about the algorithms ranking results for a given query, at least before financial incentives enter the picture.