UPDATE: Jan. 18, 2024, 12:49 p.m. EST Updated with comment from Google and additional context.
Has your Google Search experience changed for the worse? You may not be alone.
This revelation comes from a new study by German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence. The researchers posed the question “Is Google Getting Worse?”, examining 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for a year.
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The researchers worked off reports that “a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results.” A significant amount of results found in response to product-related queries were “outright SEO product review spam.”
The research showed that spam sites are hyper prevalent, showing up at the top of Google’s rankings in what is “a constant battle” between the sites and search engine. In other words, they write, “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.”
“SEO is a constant battle and we see repeated patterns of review spam entering and leaving the results as search engines and SEO engineers take turns adjusting their parameters,” reads the report. Despite Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo taking down spam, the researchers stated this only results in “a temporary positive effect.”
A Google spokesperson told Mashable that the study “doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search.” They emphasized that the study only focuses on a narrow set of queries – namely product search.
“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.
The study in question showed that Google results did improve “to some extent” between the start of the researchers’ experiment and the end. Still, they found “an overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines.” With the presence of AI-generated spam, this is only likely to get worse, the research warns.
“We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention,” wrote the researchers.
As reported by 404Media, Google being flooded by spam is being noticed by other researchers. Search Engine Journal, for example, declared that Google was overcome “by a massive spam attack” in December 2023 – one that lasted for days.