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by threeseed
1952 days ago
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You've just skipped over the early days of Google where they relied primarily on PageRank and bad actors manipulated it to death. It's trivial to generate webs of fake, inter-related content and use that specifically to feed incoming links to valuable pages. Or to comment-spam websites so aggressively it ruins them. Or all of the secret deals between high-ranking sites to feed links even though the sites weren't related. There are countless examples of black-hat techniques to break PageRank. I am sorry but you simply can't build a sustainable search engine without deeply understanding the user intent and the meaning behind the indexed pages. |
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there are also countless of adversarial examples to trick ML algorithms. In fact this is in many ways worse because of the 'idiot savant' character of ML systems, which are almost always oblivious to context and can be tricked in ways that aren't apparent from the design of the system.
In contrast to systems that are legible or even formally verifiable ML systems are entirely unable to provide any guarantees. When someone breaks pagerank at least it's apparent how they broke it. When an ML system mistakes a turtle with a fractal pattern on its shell for a gun nobody knows how to fix the system in any reliable way, other than feed it more data and pray.