Search engines now read sarcasm with near-human accuracy

For decades, search engines were essentially digital dictionaries that looked for exact word matches, often failing to understand when a user was being ironic. That changed with the introduction of transformers, a type of neural network that processes 100 trillion web pages by looking at the relationships between words rather than the words in isolation. By analyzing the surrounding context, these systems can now identify sarcasm with 92% accuracy, a level of nuance that was once considered uniquely human.