Google Search has been caught in a massive wave of generative AI garbage.
It’s starting to look like an unrecognizable pile of spam, filled with nonsensical search engine optimization (SEO) and news of dubious origin.
“These are the worst quality results on Google I’ve seen in my 14-year career,” eminent SEO expert Lily Ray he said to Fortune.
Instead of filtering out scams, Google seems to be giving in to the pressure and promoting them instead.
“Right now, it looks like the scammers are winning,” Ray added.
Researchers recently confirmed these suspicions, finding that Google consistently ranks ad-laden spam. In a one year studyfirst reported by 404 Mediaa team of German researchers studied the search results of thousands of product review terms and found some shocking results.
The team found an “inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns.”
In other words, “search engines seem to be missing the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam,” the team concluded in their paper.
And, as you might expect at this point, generative AI is likely to play a central role in spreading this low-quality content.
“The line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms is becoming increasingly blurred, a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI,” the researchers write.
Despite seeing some improvement in results since the start of their experiment in terms of affiliate spam, the team still observed a “downward trend in text quality,” leaving “a lot of room for improve”.
There is plenty of evidence to support the theory that generative AI is slowly ruining the internet.
With the democratization of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, content farms are generating vast amounts of poorly researched and often completely unedited content.
Even once-respected publications are being captured by generative AI tools, and often with less-than-stellar results, like BuzzFeed, CNET, and Sports Illustrated.
And technology’s mutually beneficial relationship with SEO, the practice of tweaking content to increase discoverability and rank higher in search results, appears to be compounding Google’s problems.
This does not bode well, given AI’s tenuous connection to reality and inability to tell the truth.
Google’s forays into AI-powered search leave a lot to be desired. Its Search Generative Experience, which was released in beta form last year, has trouble answering simple questions like naming “countries in Africa that start with the letter k” and sometimes provides wildly inaccurate information.
In short, there’s a good reason why users “share their observation that search engines are becoming less able to find genuine and useful content that meets their information needs,” as the researchers noted Germans in their article.
the “enshitification” and “scold“of the Internet is real, and generative AI is largely to blame.
More on Google: As Google turns to AI, CEO warns it will lay off even more staff
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