Search engines like Google are becoming less useful, according to a new study. SEO optimized web pages monetized with affiliate links are more likely to return.These types of pages “show signs of lower text quality,” according to the study.
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It seems to be true: search engines like Google are getting worse.
Search engine results are full of spam these days, according to a new report paper from a team of researchers in Germany. And it’s making it harder for people to access useful information online, the basic function of the Internet.
The researchers looked for product reviews that “offered evidence and purchase recommendations.” They spent a year analyzing nearly 7,400 of these queries across three search engines: Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo.
Their basic conclusion was that search engines have “significant problems” with affiliate links – paid links that refer a customer to a marketer. Although the number of online product reviews that contain affiliate links is not large, the researchers said that such reviews are overrepresented in search engine results.
The problem with affiliate links comes down to “trust,” the researchers said.
“Because users often trust their search engines, the affiliate inherits that trust as a byproduct of a high ranking,” the authors wrote. But this also creates tension between affiliates, search providers and users because affiliates are more likely to design web pages to optimize their rankings instead of investing in higher quality product reviews.
While web pages that have more affiliate links and are more optimized are more likely to appear in search results, on average, they also “show signs of lower text quality,” the researchers said.
And as AI-generated content continues to flood the Internet, researchers said search engine results are likely to get worse.
A Google spokesperson told Business Insider in an email that the study looked “narrowly at product review content,” so it doesn’t reflect the “overall quality” of Google Search.
“We’ve rolled out specific improvements to address these issues, and the study itself notes that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines.”
The study’s researchers said they believed the problem “deserves more attention” but that, for now, they don’t see an obvious solution.
“Affiliate marketing itself is partly responsible for how online content is now viewed,” Janek Bevendorff, research assistant at the University of Leipzig and co-author of the paper. he said The Register “Banning it completely is probably not a solution,” since many legitimate websites rely on affiliate marketing and SEO optimization as an important revenue stream, Bevendorff told the network.
“In the end, it may still be a game of cat and mouse,” Bevendorff said.
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