Do you find that Googling something just isn’t enough these days? Whereas once the search engine sufficed, people are being forced to use additional platforms to find stuff online, from scouring Reddit to scrolling through TikTok.
Anecdotal evidence and news reports aside, there’s been little research on the apparent decline of the once invaluable search engine. Well, a new study finally puts the matter to rest: Google is getting worse, according to German academics. And, the culprit is a torrent of garbage content that has been optimised to appear higher in search results than quality information.
To make matters worse, the growth of generative artificial intelligence will only make it easier to produce said content, the researchers claim, muddying the waters even more for netizens.
The findings come by way of a new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
Focusing on product reviews, the academics found that the fundamental problem with search engines is that they surface low-quality results that are little more than glorified adverts. The goal of this type of content is to convince you to buy something, and to earn a cut from the resulting sale from shopping sites like Amazon and eBay.
To be clear, this technique, known as affiliate marketing, is employed by legitimate sites and reputable newspapers, too. But the main difference is that they actually test out the items they claim to review, and provide genuine verdicts. At its worst, the barrage of mediocre content that appears on search engines is nothing more than useless spam.
Or in the words of the researchers, it’s “review spam” that has been tweaked to appear atop search results. Rather than producing original or unique reviews to rank higher, the people behind this content prioritise keywords that people would Google when looking it up.
The end result sends the right signals to search engines, but doesn’t offer anything of use for everyday users. Hence, the growth of TikTok and Reddit, where you can find reviews from regular people if you search hard enough.
As part of their analysis, the team looked at more than 7,000 product review queries on Google, Bing, and fellow search engine DuckDuckGo. These were then compared to results from Chat Noir, a large-scale web search tool used by researchers.
The list encompassed everything from popular searches like “best headphones” to bizarre and basic queries like “best anvils” or “best alphabet toys.”
Most of the data was scraped between August 2022 and September 2023. They also looked at things like keyword classifications of page headings, affiliate links placed on a page, and the top domains for product reviews, among other criteria.
All told, they concluded that higher ranked pages on search engines are “on average more optimised, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and… show signs of lower text quality”.
Still, they note that Google and others have seen positive outcomes in their efforts to quash this type of content. Review spam sites are usually short-lived and de-indexed or penalised quickly, the researchers explain. Larger “review farm sites” also typically vanished temporarily following Google’s updates to its ranking system, they add.
The researchers also admit that Google’s results have improved to an extent since the start of their experiment. However, they end by saying that several spam domains still exist, coupled with “an overall downwards trend in text quality”.
Of course, Google has refuted the results of the study. A spokesperson for the company said it “doesn't reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search".
In particular, they said the researchers looked at a limited category of results, and ignored the vast breadth of daily queries.
"This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day.
“We’ve launched specific improvements to address these issues – and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest," said the spokesperson.
