Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results.

In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so searching for "gold plates" on other search engines would return results for "gold" and results for "plates", that seems crazy now but that's just how it was back then.

"learning" how to search is precisely what google didn't require, they used data and some key insights to do a lot of "magic" behind the scenes to match the way people actually used search engines into results, and without needing to advertise being a "human" search engine like Ask Jeeves.