While smaller companies seems to have a hard time implementing A/B-testing Google seems to be running tens or hundreds of tests continously.
Here's a nice trick: If you report any issue on a search results page it seems to opt you out of the experimental group and you get normal results for some hours/days/weeks. Still not great like in 2009 but not as crazy as whatever bugs you now. At least it has worked for me on a couple of occasions.
Googlers: If you are relying on people giving feedback to know if a change is annoying users, be aware that your feedback process actively discourages people from submitting feedback. Even I have to be reaaalllly motivated to send feedback.
How quaint.
A common human fallacy is to pick a medium size number and think it is big. People have trouble grasping large scale (perhaps due to how our senses instinctively use a logarithmic scale)