Hyderabad: There has been a rush of brickbats by the users on junk content on Google search engines. A group of German researchers has concluded that search engine results are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites.
The research-German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence tried to answer the question "Is Google Getting Worse?", by examining 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo in a year-long study.
The constant battle-"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 said. Despite Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo taking down spam, the researchers stated this only results in "a temporary positive effect."
'Optimised content'- The comprehensive study found that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimised content, more than is representative of the entire web according to a baseline retrieval system on the ClueWeb22 report. The researchers also discovered that "a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results."
Product search- In response to these product-related searches, the researchers concluded that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do.
Algorithm fails- According to the study, there exists an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns. The effort by Google to update its algorithm to prioritise "people-first content" was in vain as the SEO experts and spam factories have simply figured out how to game the newest tweaks to the system, the researchers said.
The AI impact- The researchers did praise the search engines, though. This was primary because the results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of their experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam. Yet, there are evident spam domains and also see an overall downward trend in text quality in all three search engines, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement. The research warned that with the presence of AI-generated spam, this is only likely to get worse.
"We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention," the researchers said.
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