It’s such a hall of mirrors.
I heard about a study finding that search result quality has declined over time, because the sites that rise in the search result rankings do so because of over-aggressive SEO (gaming the system), rather than any inherent content quality or utility. It’s survival of the cheaters, not survival of the best.
In an ironic twist, when I looked for this research paper, Google’s AI search summary provided a succinct and useful overview of the research that says Google is awful. Really, Google is largely to blame for this. Their scorched-earth strategy of flattening the competition and paying for placement on devices and browsers, plus their economic disincentive to provide organic results over ads, means they are the corporation calling the shots on how information is formatted, presented, and found.
Here’s what Google’s own AI search results say:
Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines is a 2024 academic study by researchers from the University of Leipzig, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and ScaDS.AI. The study’s findings suggest that search engines like Google are getting worse at providing helpful information because search results are increasingly filled with spam content. The study’s main conclusions are:
• It’s harder to tell real content from spam
• This is especially true with AI-generated content.
• Search engines’ improvements are temporary
• Search engines update their algorithms to fight SEO spam, but the improvements are only temporary.
• Search engines are optimizing for SEO
• Successful sites use keywords in alt text and other areas to get search engines to notice them.
• Higher-ranked pages are more optimized
• These pages are also more likely to be monetized with affiliate marketing and have lower text quality.
• All search engines have problems with highly optimized content
The study monitored Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries and found that all three search engines have significant problems with highly optimized content.
Here’s the original paper:
And in a further ironic twist, the first search result on this paper is an AI-written abstract of the study, created by an AI-writing software company which is the sort of vendor directly responsible for the degradation of the internet described above.