Google’s search results are becoming less useful and filled with more spam websites, according to research that appears to validate a long-standing belief that the search engine is getting worse.
German researchers said a flood of “search-engine-optimised but low-quality content” had polluted the results of popular search engines including Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, and that the problem was likely to worsen as artificial intelligence improves.
Internet users have complained in recent years that Google and other search engines have become less useful, as they add features and attempt to secure more advertising revenue.
The problem has also been attributed to an overwhelming quantity of ‘SEO spam’, referring to search-engine-optimised web pages specifically written for Google’s algorithm rather than answering people’s questions.
The researchers, at Germany’s Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Dresden-based Centre for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, studied thousands of search terms for product reviews.
They found that compared to the wider web, sites that featured high up in search results were far more likely to be of poor quality and geared towards affiliate marketing, in which the sites receive commissions for driving purchases on websites like Amazon.
The researchers said search engines were becoming victims of “large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns” and that “significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam”.
Search engines such as Google are constantly updated to avoid spam, but the researchers said that they appeared to be losing the “cat-and-mouse game”.
Perceptions that Google results are declining have led many users to resort to hacks, such as adding the names of web forums such as Reddit when making searches, to ensure they are reading material not produced by spam websites.
Others have turned to chatbots such as ChatGPT to give simple answers.
Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, said in 2022 that the growth of the internet had increased the incentives for spam websites.
She said: “When you see the quality of your search results go down, it’s natural to blame Google and be like, ‘Why are they worse?’,” she said on a podcast.
“I think because there’s a lot of economic incentive for misinformation, for clicks, for purchases. There’s a lot more fraud on the web today than there was 20 years ago.”
The research, first reported by the tech website 404 Media, found that despite multiple updates aimed at reducing poor-quality results, there was “an overall downwards trend in text quality”.
A Google spokesman said: “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.”
