On Mathematics, Experimentation and Value

Jeff Ferguson of Amplitude Digital recently authored a piece entitled “Do We Have the Math to Truly Decode Google’s Algorithms?”  on the venerable Search Engine Journal with substantial assistance from Data Analytics Consultant Jennifer (Fields) Hood.  Please read the article before continuing with mine. While the article has much to commend itself, I believe that it presents faulty logic, mischaracterizations, and ultimately misleading conclusions. The answer to the question “Do we have the math to truly decode Google’s algorithms” is an emphatic No. However, the primary culprit behind this unfortunate reality is not the incompetency of industry practitioners chiseling away at the algorithm, rather the algorithm itself now...