Many people online have complained about the decline in the quality of Google search results over the past year. Research seems to support this: search engine performance is indeed deteriorating, but this does not necessarily reflect the state of Google, but rather the state of the Internet.
The new study described the decline in quality as a worrying sign, as more social media users share that search engines are becoming less able to find useful and authentic content to meet our information needs.
Researchers working at several German universities found spam, especially in the area of product accessibility. In one year, 7,392 such queries on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo were analysed. The problem mostly stems from search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses more on search engine rankings than on useful information, he writes. IFL Science.
In practice, this means pages stuffed with keywords or hiding key information deep within the article to increase reading time. Affiliate marketing — where marketers or influencers get paid for people who click on or buy products — also plays a role in product reviews.
“According to our research, all search engines have major problems with optimized (affiliate) content.” – says the team, adding that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but it dominates the majority of search results.
It's a problem that will get worse when people start using chatbots to produce content in an attempt to get ahead of search engines' ability to downgrade that content. The researchers added that all search engines fall victim to affiliate link spam campaigns, and the line between benign content and spam is becoming increasingly blurred.
According to Marissa Mayer, a former Google employee and former Yahoo CEO, the problem lies in the deterioration of the quality of the Internet: “When I started at Google, there were about 30 million websites. Today, Google has already seen more than a trillion URLs..
Mayer says people naturally blame Google when they don't get the high-quality search results they're used to, but he says Google's results are a reflection of the state of the Internet.
A study on the decline of search engines By clicking here Can be read.
