Study Confirms Decline in Google Search Quality

Researchers attribute the decline to SEO spam and aggressive affiliate marketing strategies.

Google's search quality has declined, with a recent study confirming the increasing prominence of spammed search results, the effects of recent algorithm updates, and the prioritization of user-generated content.
Researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence conducted the study, scrutinizing 7,392 product-review search terms over a year on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
The study suggests that search engines are losing the battle against SEO spam, with spammers exploiting new loopholes as algorithms evolve.
Aggressive affiliate marketing strategies, where websites prioritize monetization through product reviews with affiliate links, have been identified as a significant contributor to the decline in search quality.
Despite Google’s efforts to combat these issues, the search engine is currently in a state of disarray, prompting concerns about the overall state of the internet economy, which heavily relies on the search giant.