Google Search is the very core of Google. It’s the feature that made Google one of the biggest companies in the world, it influences our media landscape, and it dictates how we access data on an hour-by-hour level. It also provides countless answers for any number of search queries, from “how to cook spaghetti” to “if you freeze to death will you die?” Classic, classic Google.
Unfortunately, the Google that we grew up with doesn’t really seem to exist anymore—and not just because Google has become one of our many corporate overlords with just as much power as Meta, Apple, Amazon, or any other giant tech company. No, we’re talking specifically about Google Search.
As many journalists and SEO experts will tell you, Google Search seems to be busted. It’s just not working as intended anymore. And now, we have data to prove that, yes, Google really is messed up.
How does Google Search work?
No one really, truly knows how Google Search works. If The Mary Sue did, for example, we would be at the top of every single search query for every different idea you could think of. Want us to tell you where you can buy Travis Scott tickets? You’d find us! Want to learn how often you should shower? Uh, gross, but you would be able to learn that from us too.
Google keeps Search’s algorithmic functioning close to its chest. What we do know is that there are certain attributes that Google prefers from web pages. Publishing articles that appeal to these attributes is called “Search Engine Optimization,” or SEO.
Practically any digital media website creates content with SEO in mind. Some content is literally just created for Google Search, and practically every webpage from any non-paywalled journalism outlet (and plenty of paywalled sites as well) is created for Google first and foremost. This means Google is the lifeblood of a lot of websites, and like it or not (I’ll say definitely not), most journalists are dependent on Google validating our work.
So, are Google searches getting worse?
According to a recent German study, “Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines,” there is “an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity,” with practically every search engine online falling “victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns.”
In other words, content is getting worse on Google as spammy content marketing approaches populate Google searches. Increasingly, “the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms” has grown vague and blurry. This will become far more problematic as AI increasingly dominates the internet, the study predicted.
“Many searches have been taken over by low quality, trashy SEO content,” 404 Media reported on the study, “and lots of it seems potentially AI assisted or AI-generated.”
This study took a particular focus on SEO-oriented spam content for product reviews on search engine results pages (SERPs) for commercial search engines like Google. 7,392 product review queries were studied, and the report found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in [SERPs] use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.”
Additionally, the study saw “strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.” Google tends to stave off SEO-spammy content from hitting high search query rankings by curating its search queries with search results ranking updates, but the study concluded that this is merely a “temporary positive effect,” as “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.”
Overall, the study concluded that “higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.” Google is simply stuck in a “dynamic game with many players” for web search ranking and visibility, meaning Google is always at risk of directing users to spam content without extensive curation.
In other words, awful content is constantly being pushed in Google’s direction, and there’s a high likelihood that you, the user, are going to run into this garbage at one point or another during a Google search. Even though Google is trying its best to clean up Google Search, the company can’t fight an army of ne’er-do-wells spamming their way to the top.
Given the study acknowledged a sizable amount of social media complaints that “search engines are becoming less and less capable of finding genuine and useful content” for various search queries, there’s more room to study whether Google Search can effectively serve users content om, say, emergency first aid or reproductive rights. Still, this report suggests Google Search is dying to a thousand paper cuts inflicted by random people, companies, and bots who sit in front of their screens all day, spamming the internet.
(via 404 Media, featured image: nensuria/Getty Images)
