Are Google search results getting worse? It’s not your imagination, it’s real

The search results of Google would be worsening for everyone, according to a recent study. The report, conducted by researchers from the University of Leipzig, the Bauhaus University of Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (Germany), raised the question: “Is Google getting worse?”, examining 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.

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In response to these product-related searches, researchers found that “a flood of low-quality content, especially for product searches, continues to drown out any useful information in search results.” A significant amount of the results found in response to these queries were “blatant product review SEO spam.”

The research showed that spam websites have a high prevalence in search results, appearing at the top of Google rankings in what is “a constant battle” between websites and the search engine. In other words, they write, “search engines seem to be losing the cat and mouse game that is SEO spam”.

“SEO is a constant battle and we see repeated patterns of review spam coming in and out of the results as search engines and SEO engineers take turns adjusting their parameters,” the study says. Despite Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo removing spam, researchers claimed that this only produces a “temporary positive effect”.

However, the report shows that Google search results improved “to some extent” between the beginning and the end of the researchers’ experiment. Nevertheless, they detected “a general downward trend in the quality of the texts in the three search engines.”

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The study warns that with the presence of AI-generated spam, the situation is likely to worsen. “We have come to the conclusion that adversarial dynamic spam in the form of low-quality mass commercial content deserves more attention,” the researchers wrote.