No one can really overstate the way that Google search, when it rolls out in 1997, changed how people used the internet.  Before Google came out with its goal to crawl the entire web and organize the world's information, search engines were moderately useful at best.  And yet, in the early days, there was much more search competition that there is now.  But Google's "Page Rank" ranking algorythm helped crack the problem.  The algorithm counted and indexed the number and quality of links that pointed to a given website.  Rather than use a single keyword match, page rank figured that the best results would be websites that were linked to by many other high-quality websites. The algorithm worked, and the Google of the late 1990's seemed almost magical:  you typed in what you were looking for, and what you got back felt not just relevant but intuitive. The machine understood.    In 2021, Google announced MUM (short for multitask unified model), a natural-language processing technology for search that is 1,000 times more powerful than its predecessor.           In 2017, the company started talking publically about a search initiative called EAT, which stands for "Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthyness.  "The company has rolled out numerous quality rater guidelines, which help judge content to determine authenticity. One such effort, titled 'Your Money Or Your Life', applies rigorous standards to any pages that show up when users search for medical or financial information.      Google users shape search. "The younger generation searches really differently than I do, Haynes said.  They basically speak to Google like a person, where as I do keyword searching, which is old school."  But these quirks, tics, and varying behaviors are just data for the search giant.  When younger generations intuitively start talking to Google like a person, the tool starts to anticipate that and begins to behave like one (this is part of the reason behind the rise of humanized AI voice assistants).