Google has fallen to Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For years, Google moved the goalposts for what measureme

Google has fallen to Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For years, Google moved the goalposts for what measurements of a good website were and the broad internet moved in lockstep to meet those goals. Until Google settled on a "thin veneer of content but actually an ad for a service" as not too spammy to blacklist. So that is now the advice for any business. Hey, want to place highly for "St. Louis dentist"? Make a top 10 list of toothbrushing mistakes, etc. Second, Google shifted about 7-10 years ago from searching for webpages to searching for answers. This was reflected in how they communicated about search and also in stuff like showing infoboxes and AMP results. I think this was move into mobile, but it leaves the actual web underserved. The worst part is they have been removing tons of older content from the web that is still there and is still valuable but has become no longer surfaceable, even with direct quoted phrases.