Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse. It's Not Just You.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Has your Google Search experience changed for the worse? You may not be alone.
This revelation comes from a new study by German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence. The researchers posed the question "Is Google Getting Worse?", examining 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for a year.
The researchers worked off reports that "a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results." A significant amount of results found in response to product-related queries were "outright SEO product review spam."
The research showed that spam sites are hyper prevalent, showing up at the top of Google's rankings in what is "a constant battle" between the sites and search engine. In other words, they write, "search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam."
[...] A Google spokesperson told Mashable that the study "doesn't reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search." They emphasized that the study only focuses on a narrow set of queries - namely product search.
[...] "We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention," wrote the researchers.
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