Google more than any other organization on the planet has bought at least some of its own bullshit. For at least 6-7 years they've been consistently, 100% sure that generally-useful AI (or something sufficiently approximately close) is just a few short years away, and thus any investment in anything else (like people) would be wasted.

They've sacrificed countless customers, products and services on this altar, and will continue to do so probably indefinitely. They've decided they're going to live or die by the AI. Humans work there only to build, configure and maintain the machine. Every time I hear someone say "Google really needs to hire some <people>" or "Google needs to train their <people>" better I shake my head - it's like saying Ford should solve an efficiency problem with their cars by building boats.

Google is not going to do that, ever, and Google is not going to learn humility either. They're convinced they have it figured out, reality be damned.

1. Google has been an AI company from the very beginning (information retrieval).

2. Google is investing and doing generally useful applied AI, not an AGI moonshot.

3. Google's AI researchers are not 100% sure that AGI is just a few short years away.

4. Major source of income is advertisements. A lot of non-technical people work on this, allowing others to do more research and improve search.

5. Like said, AI is Google's DNA from the start. They are the biggest AI company in the world, and will die/be dethroned when they let AI research wither.

6. Avoid blanket humility, and lose hunger, innovation, dare. "At Hooli, nothing is ever impossible".

The thing is-- the answer doesn't have to be right. It just has to be credible-looking enough to make the user happy.

Are you saying we should embrace "alternative facts"?

Yes! Everyone does everyday.

It seems like the solution is to not use Business Insider. If the article gives a definitive answer how do you not just trust that number?

Business Insider had multiple data points, some clearly more correct than others, and Google's algorithm picked the least correct one. The solution is to gain the humility that allows you to accept that the algorithm you promote at the top of the page is never going to beat the manually curated database in the organic search results.

And since the most correct data point in Business Insider came from the curated source in the organic search results in the first place, the upper bound of the algorithm's correctness would have been the curated source anyway.