A new study concluded by German researchers suggests that an increase in low-quality content and SEO spam has declined the quality of search results.
Researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence recently completed a year-long study analyzing search results from Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
For the study titled “Is Google Getting Worse?”, the researchers examined 7,392 product review queries across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo to see how the content is artificially optimized to be ranked higher in search results and get more clicks.
The researchers discovered that a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, drowned any kind of useful information in search results. Also, the majority of high-ranking product reviews found in response to such queries in the result pages were “outright SEO product review spam.”
This fact is attributed to the occurrence of affiliate marketing, where websites use product reviews and roundups to generate revenue through special links directing to retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart.
“Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content — more than is representative for the entire web according to a baseline retrieval system on the ClueWeb22. Focussing on the product review genre, we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do,” noted the study.
The research team concluded Google’s declining quality is due to the manipulative SEO techniques that websites use to get higher Google rankings. The referring entity then receives a commission for clicks or purchases resulting from the referral.
“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,” the researchers wrote. In other words, they write, “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.”
The study found that Google performed significantly better than Bing and DuckDuckGo and their search results did improve over the course of the study despite the severity of the issue. However, a Google spokesperson defended the company saying that the research doesn’t capture the complete picture of Google’s overall performance, as it 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,” a Google spokesperson said.
“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.”
The study suggests that Google results did improve “to some extent” during the course of the researchers’ experiment. However, the researchers found an overall downward trend in text quality in all three search engines. The situation will only get worse with the presence of AI-generated spam, the study warns.
“We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention,” the researchers note.
