Google started with the goal of indexing the internet to make finding things online easy. They succeeded in solving that problem, but now Google has changed the way we consume, create, and used the internet. And I don’t think anyone is truly behind the wheel of Google’s search product. In 2018 Google made 3,200 changes to the search algorithm. Most of these were small tweaks, but I’d be shocked if any single person or team at Google could explain how the search engine actually ranks pages. Google has layered so much machine learning onto the human-written algorithms; I am convinced Google’s search product is now a black box even to the teams who help build and maintain it. An Oversimplified Story of Google Search When two Stanford students created Google, the idea was simple, keywords explained what a webpage was about, and inbound links indicated the importance of that page. The concept of using links to rate the importance of a page comes from bibliometrics, the statistical methods used to analyze and rank the influence of academic publications — the more citations an academic paper has from other papers, the more influential that paper is considered. Citations are also waited, meaning not every citation holds equal importance. With a lot of backstory left out, this concept lead Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create the first modern search engine. Other search engines existed for around nine years before 1998 when Google stepped into the ring. But while Archie and Veronica…Who Runs Google? Humans No Longer Drive Google Search