> You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years.

I disagree. If anything, I think I give this research more credit, because I appreciate it as imposing a normative view on what makes search results "good."

This is more than just "how do we sort a list containing billions of keys" or "how do we grab data from a distributed database;" it's also "how do we understand relevance or quality based on machine-interpretable signals?" The latter is a judgment call.