What I find most interesting about this is that a lot of supposed "smart" algorithms of Big Tech are in fact a patchwork of "dumb" rules rules and human-picked winners. This would explain why the quality of search results is failing to keep up with developments in LLMs.

This also explains why it's impossible for incumbents to unseat the winners in many search categories -- because they've literally been picked as the winners by humans at Google.

Looking at my Twitter/X feed, I also see an oddly similar dynamic. Certain accounts appear to have been manually boosted, showing up all the time -- whereas others posting even the same exact content will never appear.

Silicon valley will loudly tell you all about how wonderful they are at "democratizing," however, if you look under the surface it appears they're just hand picking the winners.