According to a study conducted by academic researchers, the complaints of users about the decreasing quality of search engine result contain some truth.
The researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and ScaDS.AI — all in Germany — concluded that “all search engines have significant problems with highly-optimized (affiliate) content.”
In their paper “Is Google Growing Worse?” Researchers conducted a longitudinal study of SEO spam on search engines. After monitoring Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google for an entire year, the researchers found that, although they couldn’t accurately predict individual page rankings, they were able to conclude that, “Higher-ranked Pages are on average more optimised, more monetized by affiliate marketing, as well as showing signs of lower quality text.”
One problem with the study was that it only included product reviews. Think of it this way: If you walk down only one aisle of a large store, you will miss out on a lot.
He told TechNewsWorld that “the study found websites that were trying to sell products, with special links which make money for them if you purchase something.” This means that they are more interested in selling than giving you good, straightforward information. This is a little like asking for help and everyone tries to sell their products instead.
Google Improving
Google spokesperson Ned Adriance stated in a TechNewsWorld statement that this study was limited to product reviews. It does not reflect the overall usefulness and quality of search, which is reflected by the billions and billions of searches we see each day.
He continued: “We have launched specific improvements in order to address these issues, and the study itself shows that Google has improved during the last year and performs better than other search engine.”
Researchers examined if changes made by search engines improved the quality of the results as part of their research. The researchers wrote: “Google updates are having an effect that is noticeable, but mostly temporary.”
The amount of spam from affiliates has decreased since our initial experiment.
They added that “yet” they could still find several domains with spam and see an overall trend of decreasing text quality across all three search engines. So there was still a lot to be done.
Promoting conspiracy theories
Adriance also stated that many third parties have measured the search engine results of other types of queries, and found Google significantly better than all others.
For example, in a paper titled “Where the Earth Is Flat and 9/11 Is an Inside Job: A Comparative Algorithm Audit of Conspiratorial Information in Web Search Results,” researchers at the University of Zurich and the University of Bern in Switzerland and the Leibniz-Institut für and Sozialwissenschaften and University of Konstanz in Germany found that “all search engines except Google consistently displayed conspiracy-promoting results and returned links to conspiracy-dedicated websites in their top results, although the share of such content varied across queries.”
It added that “search results on Google included some untrustworthy sites, but they were less frequent and tended to appear lower on the page.”
Drive Clicks Not Quality
Leipzig and Bauhaus researchers found that affiliate marketing is used in only a small percentage of online product reviews, but it’s present in most search results.
All search engines are affected by large-scale affiliate spam campaigns.
Greg Sterling, cofounder of Near MediaA website for news, analysis, and commentary.
He told TechNewsWorld that “higher quality sites would create more trust, and ultimately lead to greater success.” “But affiliate marketers are generating pages and sites quickly in order to drive clicks and rank, rather than building quality content over the long-term which requires time and money.
Imagine if you were paid for each word that you wrote in a project. It’s possible to write a lot of material, but not all will be good. Nazmul explained that some affiliate websites use this method. They write a lot to encourage people to buy products through their links.
He continued, “They are more interested in selling than giving you useful information you need.” It’s like those annoying pop-up ads that promise great things but fail to deliver.
AI is a Problem
The researchers also noted that the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms is becoming increasingly blurry — a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI.
Baruch Labunski is the CEO of Rank SecureToronto-based firm specializing in search engine optimization and website development.
He told TechNewsWorld that this would continue to reduce the quality of text while generating more spam. The amount of low quality text will continue polluting search engines until search engines decide to set new standards and raise the standards.
Nazmul said that artificial intelligence can be used for creating articles quickly. This can result in more web pages, which may look good for search engines but not much use to you.
Vigilance Required
Sterling stressed that search engine companies must constantly monitor the quality of their results. He added that they must quickly adapt their algorithms in order to combat evolving spam tactics. Google has this capability and will use AI in the background to achieve that goal.
“But,” he continued, “there also should be a human editorial dimension — such as Google’s ‘quality raters.’ It’s partly because of this that you can see Google moving more towards forums and social websites, like Reddit, as a means to guarantee more authentic results.
“Low-quality and spam content will continue as a major issue in the future,” he said. “This explains why people use TikTok and Reddit instead of searching to get information directly from real people.”
