This[0] Google blog from 2017 states they were using TPU for RankBrain which is what powers the search engine

[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/g...

They had to get special permission from the US government to export TPU's abroad to use in their datacenters. The TPU's fell under ITAR regulations (like many machine learning chips). The US government granted permission, but put some restriction like 'they must always be supervised by an american citizen', which I imagine leads to some very well paid foreign security guard positions for someone with the correct passport...

Read all that on some random government document portal, but can't seem to find it now...

All that power to show me recipes that hemhaw around and spend ten paragraphs to use all the right SEO words.

I feel like the Google results were better 20 years ago, what did they use back then before TPUs?

The web just got worse in a lot of ways, because everything needs to generate money.

I think search results 20 years ago were laughably worse than today.