Why Google search results have 'gotten worse'

If you've been thinking that Google's search results are not what they used to be, a team of scientists in Germany may have worked out why.

Google's search function "really has gotten worse", said 404 Media, which broke news of the study's finding that significant amounts of search engine results were now spam. The news has led an expert to call for a "foundational rethink of web search engines".

Cat-and-mouse game

A group of academics from Leipzig and Bauhaus universities and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence posed the question "Is Google Getting Worse?", and examined 7,392 product review queries on Google, and rival companies Bing and DuckDuckGo, for a year.

They found that a significant amount of results, returned in response to product-related queries, were "outright SEO product review spam". Spam sites are "hyper prevalent", said Mashable, and showing up at the top of Google's rankings in what is "a constant battle" between the sites and search engine.

The researchers concluded that "search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam". Their two findings for "Google specifically" were that higher-ranked pages are on average "more optimised, more monetised with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality", said Search Engine Round Table, and that Google's attempts to target the spam have a "mostly short-lived effect".

"Fundamentally, Google cannot differentiate good content from mediocre content, which leaves it open to manipulation," Barry Adams, a search expert at Polemic Digital, told The Times.

The "sheer scale" with which the web can be "flooded with superficially acceptable content" has "shifted the balance of power", he said, adding that a "foundational rethink of web search engines is required to restore the quality of search".

This is not the first time Google has been accused of losing the battle with spam. Last month, Search Engine Journal reported that Google was "apparently struggling to contain a spam attack" that had been "ongoing for days", with many domains "ranking for hundreds of thousands of keywords each".

And it might get worse

The trend comes as the internet is "flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites", said The Register, and things are "probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI", they added because new technology is "able to pump out low-quality copy in an instant". So the internet is "on pace to become further flooded by garbage".

Google is having none of it. The search giant's PR teams "promise its flagship product is best in class" and that, "in fact", Google Search is "better than ever".

Speaking to Mashable, a spokesperson 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."

The company has "launched specific improvements to address these issues" and "numerous third parties" found Google to be of "significantly higher quality" than its rivals.