Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find (404media.co) 58
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers (PDF). The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question "Is Google Getting Worse?" by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year. They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality ... we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do."
They also found that spam sites are in a constant war with Google over the rankings, and that spam sites will regularly find ways to game the system, rise to the top of Google's rankings, and then will be knocked down. "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," they wrote. They note that Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are regularly tweaking their algorithms and taking down content that is outright spam, but that, overall, this leads only to "a temporary positive effect."
"Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam," they write. Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures. The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry -- a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."
They also found that spam sites are in a constant war with Google over the rankings, and that spam sites will regularly find ways to game the system, rise to the top of Google's rankings, and then will be knocked down. "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," they wrote. They note that Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are regularly tweaking their algorithms and taking down content that is outright spam, but that, overall, this leads only to "a temporary positive effect."
"Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam," they write. Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures. The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry -- a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."
What ever happened to recursive link reputation (Score:4, Interesting)
Surely google can track down fake link networks pretty fast, and distinguish them from regular people all around the world linking in numbers to good content?
Someone with knowledge of current SEO search spamming techniques please tell me how they get around this?
Re:What ever happened to recursive link reputation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What ever happened to recursive link reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
Google doesn't care what the results are, as long as you're being served advertisements.
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Because Google has become weaker, especially for controversial topics, I also use Bing and DuckDuckGo. A lot more nowadays. That means a reduction in Google's market power.
Back in the day, there was AltaVista and then Dogpile the search aggregator. I discovered the Google results were always the best so I guess for like 20+ years, it was only Google. Times change.
Re:What ever happened to recursive link reputation (Score:5, Interesting)
I also use Bing and DuckDuckGo. A lot more nowadays.
I use DDG with the "-site:annoyingSite" quite a lot, to eliminate results from sites such as Amazon or Pinterest shown.
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Re: What ever happened to recursive link reputatio (Score:5, Insightful)
Or better yet, they stop trying to second guess what you're searching for by silently dropping search terms and/or replacing them with related words. That's the single most fucking annoying thing about Google now, they used to by default include every word you typed. Now they do the same shit excite and others used to do.
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That's the single most fucking annoying thing about Google now, they used to by default include every word you typed.
No. In my experience the results include any word you type, which is bass-ackwards. If I type "Steam on Windows" I don't want results on steam trains or window cleaners.
Re: What ever happened to recursive link reputatio (Score:5, Informative)
This is a change from older google, and older search engines. You used to be able to do "term term term +term -term". Ie, + to require that term, and - to not include that term. Ie, "apple -pie +fruit" to get results for the fruit, not the company, and not the pie. These days it is mostly all the terms. So now you put quotes around the terms or phrases you really want otherwise the results might focus on some minor word, sometimes finding results that matches all terms _except_ the first word. Ie, it wants to show the majority of results, when as a user I want relevant results. But no way I see to exclude a term from results. Ie, "apple but not the company" top results are about Apple Inc.
I suspect the powers are Google, not just for advertising purposes, decided that these ways to tweak searches were too complex for the general public who are a bit computer illiterate. So focusing on "natural language" which is not good at refining searches.
And then... the stupid spam of course. I looked up "psoriasis" once, and I got a top result saying I could buy psoriasis cheaply! There should be no rational search results algorithm that would give that result even at a low rating.
At the same time, despite Google usually giving thousands or millions of results (maybe it uses a random number generator for the actual count), there are legitimate and straight forward searches for stuff I know exists on the net that occasionally come back "no results found".
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"Did you mean 'duck'?"
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The hard copy Yellow Pages phone book I get once per year lists about 60 local plumbers. A Google search gives me about half a dozen usable hits before Angi, Yelp etc., barge in to give me a list of the 10 best plumbers in another state. The Yellow Pages started in, what, the 1960’s?
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It got decapitated by link spamming and the "AI revolution".
The google translation service has also gotten a lot worse since the "AI" degenerative models got introduced a few years back, especially for "smaller" languages, that being defined as spoken by less than 100 million.
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Sure, Jan.
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They all have. (Score:5, Interesting)
It was not long ago that you could search for $thing and many interesting hits would come up about $thing, some from little out-of-the-way websites, maybe a hit from reddit or even here.
But let's call it -- since 2020 -- all you get is commercial hits. For sale hits. Amazon hits.
No more little out-of-the-way websites.
It's like the internet has fully descended into what I feared it would be, back when I started reading /. : a fully commercial entity, made to advertise and sell.
Any other use -- like.. "liberating the world" and all that.. was a short-lived side-effect.
I've long given up on the internet for anything other than.. buying stuff. It's the world's biggest mail-order machine.
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I've long given up on the internet for anything other than.. buying stuff. It's the world's biggest mail-order machine.
You're right, it's great.
Seriously though I, and I assume many others, use it every day many times for researching professional tasks and it works. If you search for "cute bunny slippers" yes expect to get product offerings. This is the compromise of capitalism. It's better than searching for "cute bunny slippers" and ending up in the Dear Leader's work camp.
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in my line of work, what I get is substack hits.. and ms forum hits (and we all know how "on" those are). and the occasional hit from manufacturer's fora.
And it's "cute winnie the pooh made in 1989 slipper" that will get you sent to glorious re-education camp. I don't think we're too terribly far from that in the US, btw. I see the tendencies already.
Re:They all have. (Score:4, Interesting)
ugh.. i'll never live this down. no idea what stackspace is.. some fintech scam like "b1z-X?"
what i meant was stackexchange and other systems related things.
also i find it curious the lameness filter looks for the name of the owner of /. if you want to know who's got power over you, ask "who can't I criticize?"
The owners of this site, apparently.
Re:They all have. (Score:5, Interesting)
But let's call it -- since 2020 -- all you get is commercial hits.
So true. If it's not Google's own ads it's SEO garbage someone else has been faking-the-funk (and paid $$$) to push up to the front. Other stuff gets pushed to the top just because "it was on a big website" but in terms of quality it's still not at all what I was looking for.
As an example, I was trying to find a good site for news and podcasts about retro-gaming, recently. I got a few good hits, but they were still fairly big sites like Hackaday. The quality small-guy sites you mention were just nowhere on the first page or two, but I keep going and eventually found a few I liked quite well.
No more little out-of-the-way websites.
Yeah, it sucks. We used to have all these little sub-sites at Universities (boy is that over) and research centers. Even companies used to setup web servers for employees to publish content on. I remember SGI had a site called Reality [archive.org] where I got all kinds of wonderful news, demos, and help from SGI engineers and employees but it shut down in 2001 (oof I'm old).
.ru crank site to get any results at all for stuff like that, but years ago Google found it easily (but no longer).
They get shut down a lot now because hosting them is more complicated and expensive than ever and nobody wants to risk someone publishing some "misinformation", "disinformation" or heaven forbid: "malinformation". That's killed a lot of small sites that were piggy-backing on big organizations like schools.
Also, HTML 5 with CSS is way harder for folks than HTML 1.1 was and it puts form over function. The do-it-yourself attitude seems lost on folks, now and they don't bother trying. Not to mention everything is contaminated with Javascript code I'm not willing to run (yes, I use NoScript... or Dillo) but that's a separate complaint, I suppose. It's just the minute someone sees a website without a professional "UX/UI" designer, tons of CSS crapola, and slogging through a zillion lines of Javascript, they freak out because "THAT'S SO OLD LOOKING!!!" and that's the last thought before they close the tab. I'm sure Google down-ranks simple websites now, too. I know for-certain-sure they suppress a ton of search results. I noticed it during CV19 when comparing charged terms in the search and I notice it when looking for things like software-keygens or cracks. I have to go to Yandex or some other
It's like the internet has fully descended into what I feared it would be
Sounds like we both called it. I swore in 1997 that as soon as we got off phone lines and video codecs got slightly better (MPEG2 was state-of-the-art back then) the Internet would turn into a giant boob-tube, and it has. [ncta.com] It's just more expensive than cable was.
Any other use -- like.. "liberating the world" and all that.. was a short-lived side-effect.
I suffer the same lament all the time. The libertarian paradise that I was trying to help build in the 1990's has now been completely co-opt'd. It's a fucking strip mall, now just like you say. Except it's also being used a lot for propaganda.
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First, they seem to really be pushing results based on your geographic location, probably determined by your IP address. This was bad enough years ago when they started doing things like redirecting me to google.ca if I happened to be traveling in Canada, but these days it seems like for some search queries that have nothing to do with my location, h
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"AI"-generated articles that ramble on for pages upon pages
You mean those 50 screens-per-recipe websites that came out of nowhere about five years ago? The ones that display 3 pics of each ingredient, the website is talking all about the author instead of the recipe, and you have to scroll to page 47 to find the actual recipe?
Those aren't AI-generated, those are written by women.
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Re:They all have. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wow, I have been thinking of something like this for a long time, a clean start over with a simple way to make simple pages that aren't full of trackers and crap. It turns out it actually exists! Thanks for sharing it, I'm goofing with it and it looks quite fun. I hope it has some degrees of success, or at the very least, becomes a home for people to share their passion/projects/stuff for fun like we did in the 90s.
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It was not long ago that you could search for $thing and many interesting hits would come up about $thing, some from little out-of-the-way websites, maybe a hit from reddit or even here. But let's call it -- since 2020 -- all you get is commercial hits. For sale hits. Amazon hits.
Oh, it was before that. Back in December 2018, I was searching for Christmas-related stuff, and a bunch of my results were this huge wave of "2018 Global Holidays" pages, which turned out to be nothing but SEO bombs from Indians that had figured out a weakness in Google's algorithms. Fuck, I just wanted some Christmas desert recipes. You kind of expect Betty Crocker ads. You don't expect getting swamped with spam pages from Asia.
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Is there any chance that somebody would ever stand up a search service that was compensated on a monthly fee basis vice by selling our personal information? With some kind of guarantee that they did not collect our data? How much would that cost?
Startpage.com not quite so bad (Score:1)
Google changed their focus (Score:5, Interesting)
Google started as a search engine. You typed in some text, and it showed you web pages that contained that text.
Somewhere along the line, they realized a lot of people (maybe younger, maybe on mobile) were asking questions instead.
They decided to start answering those questions, and disabled the old search engine functionality.
That's why Google sucks, because you can't search for specific text anymore.
Re:Google changed their focus (Score:4, Interesting)
Yandex still exists (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to admit I've resorted to using Yandex on occasion, as it still has more of the results you expect from small sites with less blatant commercial content.
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It's not a good fit if you're looking for information about Ukraine, though.
Or if you want to know how tall Putin really is.
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Can't Win. (Score:4, Interesting)
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There is another factor in place here - people / companies / organisations have been suing Google because the algorithms are "disadvantaging" their sites, and some courts have been imposing limits on the algorithms. Guess who profits, and it ain't the people who sued. In addition, people who want their misdeeds forgotten want their misdeeds forgotten by Google.
My way around this is to use DuckDuckGo - which mostly uses Bing (anonymised) - and has not had such restrictions imposed on it.
Apropos of nothing,
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It's also their own financial incentives. Take this from the summary:
The search results would improve if having affiliate marketing downranked a page, because then you remove the financial incentives of spam SEO. But which company's the big
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I would pretty much expect this. Over the years, the quality of Google's results has always been inversely proportional to the value of gaming the results. Google has a lot of clever people, but they can not hope to compete with masses of equally clever people with direct financial incentives.
Yep, is this really a Google problem or a problem of Google's algorithm being gamed?
As you pointed out, the latter is as inevitable as entropy so I'm going with that.
So Google needs to adapt or it'll get pushed out of the market by someone new and better. I don't think Bing, et al. will do it because they're much worse than Google and waiting for platform decay to make Google as shit as they are won't work as someone new will come along with something better (which wouldn't be hard concerning Bing). G
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People seem to forget that Google is primarily an advertising company nowadays, and the search engine is just another point of data collection and ad delivery for them. If it feels like Google's search "results" are just people trying to sell you something, it's because it was redesigned to be that way.
Everyone knew this would eventually happen once Google went public, as their primary focus went from their customers to improving returns for their shareholders.
Many Google apps have gotten worse (Score:1)
Android Auto is shite
Google Maps either misses interstates completely or suggests alternate routes for an area 30 minutes earlier in my journey
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Android Auto is shite
Google Maps...
...Google Maps might suck, but there are plenty of other apps. Here WeGo is free and excellent, Sygic GPS has occasional issues with similar street names in neighboring towns, but is more than serviceable and has actual tech support.
Android Auto itself is a fairly decent platform, but you're right - keep the infrastructure, ditch the Google apps.
How about skipping to page #2 search results? (Score:2)
Why is Google still so eager to show the first page when they know that it's full of junk anyway?
I knew Google was compromised when ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I knew Google was compromised when ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're an anon and you still can't tell us what you were searching for? Huh. your story becomes much less credible.
Researchers? (Score:2)
Did the researchers google that?
I kid, I kid.
My experience:
It has been at least a few years now that google search results have been on a serous and continuous downward spiral.
More results lead to useless clickbait sites over the years and worse over the last few months the top results are AI generated CRAP.
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Looking for the telephone number of a nearby hotel, the results I got were:
booking.com
booking.co.uk
booking.fr
booking.de
booking. (whatever India's code is)
booking. (ditto for Thailand)
booking.jp
with the occasional tripadvisor equivalent sprinkled in.
spam spam spam spam spam.
I'd very much like a search engine (on my Android) which classes those sites as duplicates and does not bother showing them. Eventually I found what I wanted, rang them, and they told me the name and whereabouts of another hotel which wa
NO. FUCKING. SHIT. (Score:2)
Too much connected data? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think part of their problem is their codex is too large. The search engine can't correctly figure out how things are linked anymore since there is way too much data.
Take word like "monitor". Google thinks it is a computer display. It could also be a reptile, part of a roof, foldback speaker, a ship or about 50 other things. If the search codex shows a close enough association between a computer display and nearly every other use of the word, it is going to redefine the word into its own common use. You can find examples of this using terms for pipe organs which have a huge overlap with parts of CPU internals such as buffers, registers and accumulators are closely related in their respective fields.
I figure someone will come out with a search engine where the words then will have drop downs so the user can pick the type of thing they are searching on so they may be able to click on "monitor" and have one of the options "monitor - reptile"
Isn't it ironic... (Score:2)
If you want to read interesting stuff, there are avenues other than search engines to explore... & no, I don't mean anti-social media.
Perhaps it's finally time to redo the Web? (Score:2)
When the Web came about - I'm old enough to clearly remember the time before the web with Fidonet and Mailbox networks - I didn't really believe it would take off. Mostly because in Germany where I live using the phone would cost 20 pennies for 8 minutes back in the day in West Germany.
Like quite a few experts I completely underestimated how important colorful pictures to click on were for the vast majority of regular people. I only really got into the Web when it already had gotten critical mass, roughly a
Nearly quit Google last night... (Score:1)
Not as an employee, but as a user. WTF good is a search engine when I have to spend hours extra digging through obvious AI slapped together regurgitated crap, including Google's own promoted results. It's getting really bad.
I've already begun transitioning from gmail to protonmail. 1password to protonpass, and I'm currently evaluating duckduckgo, brave, and I dunno, maybe back to Yahoo? As mentioned, the quest is a new one. Input appreciated!
I agree (Score:2)
It's been getting worse for 12 years (Score:3)
2012 was the tipping point. After that, at work, I got more and more noise than signal, and it just keeps going downhill. I can't count the number of times I got "we couldn't find "search term" in quotes, here's what we found without the quotes... and in the first three hits, is *exactly* the search term, in quotes, on the hit page.
Plus, they're scamming the advertisers. My favorite on that was the time about six years ago I was looking for men's boots. I had -women's in the search terms, and there was a sponsored ad for "wo[bold]men's[bold] boots.
no sh*t!! (Score:1)
Google search division is gutted of engineers (Score:3)
I hear from my friends at Google that the core search division is not something that good engineers want to work on any more. Everyone who has a choice is flocking to Waymo/Google Brain or other AI-heavy product lines. Even corporate Google does not seem to be interested in search any more, there were deep cuts in that division recently and even engineers were affected.