[losvedir]

I was trying to be clever with my metaphor, but since a lot of people seemed to miss my point, I'll spell it out.

An old person's glasses and walker don't make their body feel worse. They're responses to an underlying change, and in fact make them feel better than they would without them.

Similarly, I'd argue that the ML pipelines and complexities in Google search aren't why search results are worse today. Rather, the web has changed with more SEO spam, walled gardens, content in videos, and search has changed in that you try to find more kinds of information than ever before. It's the underlying changes that make the search seem worse, and all of Google's fancy algorithms are imperfect responses to that. Without them, I'd be surprised if Google's results weren't far worse than in 2006.

The comment I responded to:

> My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines...

made it seem like maybe the ML pipelines were somehow causing the decline in quality, rather than simply an imperfect response to changes in the web since then.