Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers (https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf).
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.”
I, for one, thank these particular techno fascists for forcing me to switch to Kagi – an ad free, slightly more private, search experience.