True transparency comes at a huge cost too though. Someone like google probably makes hundreds of changes to their algorithms every single day from thousands of engineers. Thats a change every few minutes. Who could even keep up with reading and understanding that much documentation about changes to the algorithm, let alone the base way it works in the first place?
And those are just the manual changes. There are fully automated systems that crawl the web and use information from millions of web pages simply to rank your website. Any of those web pages changes, and your ranking might change with it. For true transparency, you should be able to verify that you got the right ranking as documented, yet merely calculating that is going to require you to get a copy of every other webpage in the world. No simple task.
There is certainly a limit to the level of detail that can be provided in any explanation. But that can't be an excuse for not responding at all when someone's livelihood is at stake.
There is a more general issue here. As we use more machine learning and AI, the problem of having to explain why a particular decision was taken will come up more often, especially if the decision has grave consequences.
All "AI-first" companies would be well advised to work on this problem. This is like computer security in the 1990s. It's going to be absolutely central to many applications of AI and it will be a key legal issue in future.
> Who could even keep up with reading and understanding that much documentation about changes to the algorithm, let alone the base way it works in the first place?
Someone at Google, hopefully. At least I wouldn't want to work at/be customer of a company where no one knows how their core product actually works.
If Google employees are able to keep track, so are regulators. If not, then the "cost" of requiring it may actually be a benefit.
And those are just the manual changes. There are fully automated systems that crawl the web and use information from millions of web pages simply to rank your website. Any of those web pages changes, and your ranking might change with it. For true transparency, you should be able to verify that you got the right ranking as documented, yet merely calculating that is going to require you to get a copy of every other webpage in the world. No simple task.