A year-long study has found what people have been complaining about being hard to find Reddit posts for a while now: Google is getting worse.
People have complained online that Google search results have increased in quality over the past year. The new study called it “a worrying sign that a remarkable number of social media users share their observation that search engines are becoming less able to find genuine and useful content that meets their information needs.”
“Secondly, a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, continues to drown out any kind of useful information in search results.”
A particularly spammy area, focused on by researchers at several German universities, is product review queries. The team monitored 7,392 such queries over the course of a year on search engines Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. The problem seems to stem primarily from search engine optimization (SEO), meaning content created and tailored for search engine rankings, rather than focusing on quality, useful information.
This can take the form of keyword-packed pages, or otherwise withholding key information until the bottom of an article to increase reading time (think articles about how to change your phone settings that insist on -you what is a telephone). at the top). In product reviews, affiliate marketing also plays a role, where sellers or influencers are paid to get people to click or buy a product.
“Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content, more than is representative of the entire web,” the team explained, adding that “only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but most all search results do.”
Unfortunately, it’s a problem that could get worse as people use chatbots to produce more and more content, trying to stay ahead of search engines’ ability to demote that content by tweaking their algorithms.
“Furthermore, we observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing usage and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns,” he wrote the team. “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.”
There are a number of explanations for the decline in the usefulness of search engines, including what is called “enshitification“, where companies they “abuse their users to make things better for their business customers” before they “ultimately abuse those business customers to recoup all the value for themselves.”
Marissa Mayer, the 20th employee to join Google, who went on to serve as CEO of Yahoo, cross that the problem is because the Internet itself is getting worse.
“I think the quality of the Internet has taken a hit,” Mayer said Freakonomics. “When I started at Google, there were about 30 million web pages, so crawling them all and indexing them all was relatively simple. It sounds like a lot, but it’s small. Today, I think there was a point where Google ‘had seen more. more than a billion URLs”.
Mayer added that it was natural for people to blame Google when they don’t get the quality search results they used to, but he sees Google results as a window into the web itself.
“The real question is, why is the web getting worse?”
The study has been made available online by the Webis Group.
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