Google Search is the core of Google. It’s the feature that has made Google one of the biggest companies in the world, influences our media landscape and determines how we access data hour by hour. It also provides countless answers for any number of search queries, from “how to cook spaghetti” to “if you freeze to death, will you die?” Google classic and classic.
Unfortunately, it seems the Google we grew up with no longer exists, and not just because Google has become one of our corporate overlords with the same power as Meta, Apple, Amazon, or any other giant tech company. No, we’re specifically talking about Google Search.
As many journalists and SEO experts will tell you, Google Search appears to be broken. It just doesn’t work as intended anymore. And now, we have data to prove that, yes, Google really is messed up.
How does Google Search work?
No one really knows how Google Search works. If The Mary Sue did, for example, we’d be at the top of every search query for every different idea you can think of. Want us to tell you where you can buy Travis Scott tickets? You would find us! Want to know how often you should shower? Uh, gross, but you might as well learn it from us.
Google keeps Search’s algorithmic operation close to its chest. What we do know is that there are certain attributes that Google prefers in web pages. Publishing articles that appeal to these attributes is called “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO.
Virtually any digital media website creates content with SEO in mind. Some content is literally just built for Google Search, and virtually every webpage on any non-paid journalism outlet (and many paywall sites, too) is built for Google first. This means that Google is the lifeblood of many websites, and whether we like it or not (I’ll definitely say no), most journalists depend on Google to validate our work.
So are Google searches getting worse?
According to a recent German study“Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines,” there is “an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity,” with virtually every online search engine that they are “victims of large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns.”
In other words, content gets worse on Google as spammy content marketing approaches fill Google searches. Increasingly, “the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms” has become vague and blurred. This will become much more problematic as AI increasingly dominates the Internet, the study predicted.
“A lot of searches have been taken up by bad, poor SEO content,” 404 Media reported about the study, “and many of them appear to be potentially assisted or generated by AI.”
This study specifically focused on SEO-oriented spam content for product reviews on search engine results pages (SERPs) for commercial search engines such as Google. 7,392 product review queries were studied and the report found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in [SERPs] use affiliate marketing and significant amounts are SEO product review spam.
Additionally, the study observed “strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.” Google tends to prevent spammy SEO content from ranking high in search queries by curating their search queries with search result ranking updates, but the study concluded that it’s only ‘a “temporary positive effect” as “search engines seem to be losing the cat. and mouse game that is SEO spam.
Overall, the study concluded that “higher-ranking pages are, on average, more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality.” Google is simply caught in a “dynamic game with many players” for web search ranking and visibility, which means that Google is always at risk of directing users to spam content without thorough care.
In other words, horrible content is constantly being pushed in Google’s direction, and there’s a good chance that you, the user, will come across this garbage at one point or another during a Google search. While Google is doing its best to clean up Google Search, the company can’t fight an army of people who don’t take it upon themselves to spam all the way to the top.
it is unsettling to consider the possibility that there was, in human history, a brief window where all public knowledge was readily accessible to anyone with a computer, and that that window has now closed. https://t.co/1lzlevmIAr
— Julie Muncy (@juliemuncy23) January 17, 2024
Since the study acknowledged a considerable amount of complaints on social media that “search engines are becoming less and less able to find genuine and useful content” for various search queries, there is more room to study whether the Search of Google can effectively serve user content, for example, emergency first aid or reproductive rights. Still, this report suggests that Google Search is dying from a thousand paper cuts inflicted by random people, companies, and bots who sit in front of their screens all day, spamming the Internet .
(via 404 Mediafeatured image: nensuria/Getty Images)
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