It’s not every day that Google makes an announcement like this. On Tuesday, March 5, presented by the web giant several changes to the algorithm that organizes your search engine results. The goal was to “help us reduce the amount of useless and poor-quality content, and increase the number of useful results,” Elizabeth Tucker, the search engine’s product manager, told Le Monde.
Without mentioning them, the tech giant appears to be trying to answer critics who have been asking for months, even years, why Google’s results are of increasingly poor quality, like the NBC reporter who asked on February 24, “Has anyone finally had enough and quit Google Search?”
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Countless posts from users wondering why their search results it doesn’t look so good as they used to do can be found on Reddit. “Using Google once was like magic,” wrote The Atlantic last September, lamenting an era that seems gone. “Now you find a lot of things that are either ads or you’ve figured out how to play with the search rankings in such a way that you’re frustrated.” added specialized site 404 Media.
Even worse, as Google transforms itself more and more in an “answer engine”, as Olivier Ertzscheid, a professor of information science at the University of Nantes, says, sometimes it even comes up with false results, like the one he offered a Le Monde reporter when he was researching the French minister of education , below: Nicole Belloubet is the correct answer. These mistakes are all the more notable given that Google has entered the race for generative artificial intelligence (AI), known to regularly “hallucinate” his results.
“All search engines have a problem”
The examples of rough or poor quality answers, listed here and there and mainly in the technophile fields – have met with an absence of scientific scrutiny so far. But in January, a paper by researchers from the universities of Leipzig and Weimar appeared titled “Is Google getting worse?” The study, which focused on product reviews, notes that “higher-ranking pages are, on average, more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality.”
“All search engines, including Google, have a problem,” one of the authors explained to Le Monde. “We can see that when Google makes an update, the search results improve for a week or two, generally. Then, little by little, they deteriorate again.”
Google does not share this view. In a reply sent to the site 404 Mediaaccuses the studio of “looking closely at the content of product reviews” and not “[reflecting] the overall quality and usefulness of the search.” More broadly, in the case currently against the US government, the company recently stated that the quality of its results had “continuously improved over its 25 years” and that it “continually strives to improve its search quality”.
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