Amit Singhal's method for maintaining Google's search business unit was its success. Hopefully they realize the ML pipe dream is a failure sooner than later.
This doesn’t seem like something that could be fixed by using a rule based approach, because it would require actually understanding the subject matter.
Care to elaborate on how Amit ran things differently?
Search rules were written by hand and not left to an automatic process
were there less SQL injection vulnerabilities in the search results back then?
Yes. Search as a whole was a far superior level of quality. Today's Google search is as bad as Yahoo's search in the early 00s.