Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, appeared on an episode of Search Off the Record to discuss how AI evolved inside Google Search. Todorovic leads Google’s SafeSearch engineering team and has worked in the search organization for 15 years. He said machine learning was difficult to deploy broadly across Search because complex models are harder to understand and fix than simpler systems. He was explaining why Google could not simply apply ML systems across Search at once. Todorovic said these models can “function like a kind of a black box” because engineers don’t always understand what happens underneath. That makes debugging harder when search systems change over time or when a model needs to be replaced, he said. SafeSearch As Proving Ground Todorovic said SafeSearch was one of the first places where Google could deploy AI models in Search because the team could isolate those systems from the main ranking flow.…