[manachar]

Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want.

It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods.

I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO.

This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful".

Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.

[DancesWTurtles]

Little nitpick: "the algorithm" does not even find the things "most people wants"; it finds the things some executive or other decided it was the most convenient to find taking into account the needs of the corporation only. Yes, there is theoretically some way to return, up to some degree, what people would find useful; but the decisions are not made by the people fiddling with the algorithms. Those people have their hands tied and must follow the interests of someone who most of the time knows nothing about algorithms or people or the end product.

[skybrian]

Even a little research would show that Google is far more sophisticated than that in tuning its search engine.

[pizza]

ironic. search engine optimization, rather than minimizing the entropy of search, maximized it..

[cassianoleal]

It's not like the people at Google didn't know about Goodhart's Law. Somehow I don't think SEO was ever meant to improve search results.

[carom]

Gluten free isn't a health fad. Please learn about celiacs.

[joebob42]

The set of celiacs is much smaller than the set of people who think eating gluten free food is a good idea.

[mechanical_bear]

It is a health fad for most. People with actual diagnosed celiac's disease are rare. Self diagnosed… that is another deal…

[tleilaxu]

It can be both…