I mean blackbox in the sense that I can't explain how it works or look under the hood and understand it. Many machine learning models you want to be explainable for UX or debugging (e.g. Netflix's "because you watched X"). This is a rare case where it's better if you can't figure out how it produced a result.
Instead, you want to throw queries and user behavior into a blackbox algo and have it tell you a result then give it feedback on whether the result was good (did the user come back and ask the same question? did they click the top result and leave or did they have to come back and click through many more?). I think this is kind of how google works now, though results are frequently meh. Millions of backlinks will get you noticed but your ranking will just keep dropping if users don't appear to find your content useful (e.g. they hit the back button a lot and keep searching).
>(did the user come back and ask the same question? did they click the top result and leave or did they have to come back and click through many more?).
What stops me from writing a bot to simulate that behaviour for my website (or websites of my competitors) ?
Instead, you want to throw queries and user behavior into a blackbox algo and have it tell you a result then give it feedback on whether the result was good (did the user come back and ask the same question? did they click the top result and leave or did they have to come back and click through many more?). I think this is kind of how google works now, though results are frequently meh. Millions of backlinks will get you noticed but your ranking will just keep dropping if users don't appear to find your content useful (e.g. they hit the back button a lot and keep searching).