A study released by the Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI in Germany asked if Google Search is getting worse. The 16 page paper, downloadable as a PDF over here says that Google has slightly improved in some areas but there is still a lot of spammy content within Google Search.
The study manually reviewed the resulting queries and discarded near-duplicates and queries with artifacts or poor wording, resulting in a final list of 7,392 unique search queries. This was done across Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. The study was done by scrapping the results every two weeks between October 26th, 2022, until September 19th, 2023. It focused on product reviews types of queries.
Here is a chart showing what it found:
The two conclusions for Google specifically were:
(1) That higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
(2) Google updates do target the spam, they wrote, “Google’s updates in particular are having a noticeable, yet mostly short-lived, effect. In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam. Yet, we can still find several spam domains and also see an overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement.”
I found this via Mashable. I am just not sure if the Mashable headline matches what the study says exactly?
I am not sure that the actual study says what the Mashable headline says… Did I read the study wrong? It says Google has got better… pic.twitter.com/zwazezI7kQ
