Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find

· Jan 16, 2024 at 1:28 PM

"The majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam."

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find — Image: Pixabay

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Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers.

The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question "Is Google Getting Worse?" by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.

They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality ... we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do."