Google search increasingly doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
The search engine that has become a 21st-century staple in virtually everyone’s lives, used billions of times a day, is struggling with the unintended consequences of a recent update. Basically everything has been spammed. Welcome to the age of web search spam.
“These are the worst quality results on Google that I’ve seen in my 14-year career,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at digital marketing agency Amsive Digital.
Pop-ups, fake product ads, and links that are sure to download some impossible-to-remove malware are commonplace on the Internet. But you don’t usually see them interspersed between Google websites. With billions of searches a day to go along with the countless websites on the internet, Google can only catch so many of these scammers before they resurface as a digital hit game.
“Right now, it looks like the scammers are winning,” Ray tells Fortune.
In essence, what happened, according to Ray, was that Google released an update to its algorithm that pushed user-generated content higher in the rankings of its search results. The idea was that when users asked a question, they could see answers from other real people who might have the answer, further democratizing the web and taking the gatekeeper authority away from, say, news sites like Fortune. Google called this the Hidden Gems update, rolled out in a series of changes from May to November 2023, because it was supposed to find the best answers on the internet regardless of who posted them. So if a user searched “What is the most used silencer?” or “how do I know if my homebrew has gone bad?” they would find answers from other people who had car problems or were more experienced homebrewers.
Instead, what ended up happening was that unscrupulous sites realized they could take advantage of the new policy by spamming links to sites prioritized by Google’s new algorithm, according to Ray.
“Google Docs, Google Maps, Linkedin, Reddit, anywhere you can imagine there’s a forum, spammers take advantage of it,” says Ray.
A recent to study from researchers in Germany who examined the quality of product review websites, which he previously reported 404 Media, is in line with Ray’s claims. According to the research, the pages that ranked higher in the searches they performed tended to have lower quality text and more affiliate links intended to monetize those sites. However, the quality of Google’s search surpassed that of its competitors Bing and DuckDuckGo. The company also had the most effective mitigation tactics compared to other search engines, although spammers would also find ways around them.
As Ray said Gizmodo on the state of web search: “I’ve never seen Google so messed up.”
“SEO parasites” take down legitimate web pages
The reason some bad actors found it worth spamming the new search update was because of something called affiliate links. They are a common online practice whereby a website can earn a commission if a product is purchased after clicking on a link on one of its pages. If a website with a lot of affiliate links can get to the top of the stack in Google Search, that can be quite lucrative for whoever owns that website. And scammers try to take advantage of the rules to try to sell worthless products by linking to useless websites.
Just getting into the top positions in Google is a business in itself known as search engine optimization or SEO. SEO was a $76 billion business last year, according to market research firm IBISWorld. It’s another very common practice for virtually any company with an online presence (including every story this reporter publishes on Fortune.com). SEO has become a fundamental part of most online marketing and is considered a specialty in the advertising world. When done right, it ensures that the most relevant information appears in the most visible places on Google.
For example, people who live in an area where a hurricane is expected to make landfall would want reliable sources of weather alerts, such as the National Weather Service or a local news outlet, at the top of their Google searches. The annoying side effect is that many search results now look the same. A simple search for something like “best sheets” turns up dozens of the same article with titles like “The 8 best sheets of 2024” or “The 22 best sheets” or the more colorful “These are our favorite sheets”. to catch some Z’s.”
critics of SEO would say that it has turned online search into a homogenous experience where all the results reiterate the same information. Filterworld, a new book by New York staff writer Kyle Chayka, argues that now, roughly 30 years into a world changed by the Internet, the power of the algorithm has gone beyond culture to preserve countless everyday experiences in “feeds,” to example, a strangely similar cafe aesthetics around the world. On the other hand, supporters would argue that it is a way to reward the best websites, particularly if they are small businesses that may not be able to afford large advertising budgets for paid sites at the top of Google search results.
“The billion-dollar search engine companies’ ongoing battle with SEO-affiliated spam should serve as an example that web search is a dynamic game with many players, some with bad intentions,” write the authors of the study.
A Google spokesperson said the study is flawed because it only looked at certain search terms. “This particular study looked at product review content and does not reflect the overall quality and usefulness of search for the billions of queries we see every day,” they told Fortune in an email.
Another problem that caused the quality of Google search results decline, according to Ray, are what she calls “SEO parasites” that are “pulling back from the big publishers.” It’s when a trusted website rents space on its site, and especially its domain name, to third parties for sponsored content. These third parties take advantage of the traffic and respectability of the main site to fill their sponsored post with affiliate links. It’s technically allowed, but it’s not a great experience.
“People are exploiting loopholes in Google,” says Ray.
The study by German researchers also found that the prevalence of affiliate links could be correlated with lower quality websites. “Furthermore, we see an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing usage and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns,” says l study “However, we also see the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becoming increasingly blurred, a situation that is sure to get worse in the wake of generative AI.”
From the early days of AI, watchdogs warned that it could be used to facilitate scams. AI-generated voice recordings could impersonate people or their loved ones as part of a ploy to access their banking information or medical records. Whereas in the case of online search, AI allows fraudsters to do this junk content this is cluttering the google search results to one unprecedented scale.
A Google spokesperson told Fortune a publish to X de Ray that highlighted Google’s handling of a complaint about dark content hosted on a Harvard University URL, and stated that the company was working to “take steps to better deal with third-party content on this nature”. Google’s account also specified that it was “probably a case of the site not knowing that this content was placed there rather than an intentional attempt to host it.”
Google also acknowledged in its statement to Fortune that it has “rolled out specific improvements to address these issues [highlighted in the study].” Google noted that its own study notes that Google Search has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. “More generally, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found that Google has significantly higher quality than the rest.”
Ray agrees that Google is aware of the problem and is working to fix it, likely through a combination of user policy and algorithm updates. “Generally speaking, Google always gets things right,” he says. “They just take their time.”
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