Precisely. The main problem with google is that it's extremely hard to align yourself with the goals of humans with human needs, so they have to look at proxy

Precisely. The main problem with google is that it's extremely hard to align yourself with the goals of humans with human needs, so they have to look at proxy metrics to rank sites before anyone actually hits them. Their current proxy metric appears to be that there is a lot of human-sounding text on the page, and so people optimizing for that are going to put a lot of text on the page, factual accuracy be damned. In the naughts, their metric used to be that many sites linked to yours, and so people optimized that by creating webrings.