It takes a different design of index and algorithms to do what Google has openly had as a goal since well before Porat came on board than it does to be the kind of highly literal search engine Google started as.

There's a market for both, and the market for a well-designed, comprehensive, highly literal engine probably pays a lot more per user than the kind Google is focussed on. But it also is much narrower if there is a Google around. (It's also not clear that the web is the highest-value corpus for such an engine; the really commercially successful ones are more specialized and have large, human curated and annotated datasets is specialized domains, notably law.)

Whenever I see horrible search results, I often wonder if those people who work at Google, and surely use their own search engine as much as anyone else, have noticed the degradation and what they think of it --- especially those who are in charge of or even working on the search engine themselves. Does Sundar search, get horrible results, and think "Why is my search engine half-broken? This is my company's most prominent product, and it's not working as well as it used to." No doubt it affects all their engineers too, the ones who will tend to be looking for the most obscure things.

I think your point about metrics and revenue is very true --- they are numbers that can be easily compared, while the quality of search results is not (and also subject to a lot of different conditions); being a "data driven" company, they obviously place much emphasis on the former, ignoring the negative but not easily quantifiable effect on search quality.

As the catchy saying goes, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts." Unfortunately a lot of Google's management don't seem to believe in it.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rackless

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes, that was my thought too, hence why I asked them if that was indeed what they meant by it. An archaic/dialectic spelling of reckless is strange too though, so I'm not really sure which is more likely. Just out of curiosity - if it only just now occurred to you that 'rackless' could refer to her body, then what did you think I was calling the comment out for?

It's funny because it says a lot about some people who immediately thought it was a comment about breasts rather than either a typo, alternatively spelling or rack referring to data centre technology (on a technology site).

Has the OP confirmed that this is what the phrase meant? Because otherwise you're projecting meaning on something that may not have been intended (again, I have the back ground to recognize this kind of slur but I didn't see it in the original comment until it was pointed out). Why would you do that?