It seems the number one search engine isn’t meeting our search needs.
People have been complaining about the decrease in the quality of Google's search results especially for product searches.
Most of the time if people are unsure about an item purchase or want a second opinion, they tend to look for online reviews. But lately, Google isn't being as useful as it used to be in providing these answers.
One year-long study, conducted by several German universities, looked into product review queries on the World Wide Web, evaluating 7,392 search queries in total.
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The study itself found that search engines including Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo are struggling with highly optimised affiliate content.
The researchers stated: ‘A troubling sign that a noticeable number of social media users are sharing their observation that search engines are becoming less and less capable of finding genuine and useful content satisfying their information needs.’
‘Reportedly, a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results.’
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Essentially, search engines are having a tough time finding the good stuff because the content is crammed with keywords to 'look better' on search rankings, without having any meat on the bone.
Or, the genuinely useful stuff is buried deep down on the webpage to increase the users' time spent on the page.
Additionally, the study pointed out that the problem could get even worse with the rise of generative AI tools which could make it even easier to produce this kind of content.
Despite Google's efforts to combat the decline in search quality by updating its search algorithm and filtering out low-value affiliate content, the study showed that these changes only led to temporary improvements.
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Eventually, SEO spammers find new ways to bypass the system.
The researchers said: 'Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimised (affiliate) content—more than is representative for the entire web.'
They added that 'only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do.'
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According to the study team, one reason for the decline in content usefulness is due to something called 'enshittification.' This is where companies 'abuse their users to make things better for their business customers before they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.'
Marissa Mayer, Google's first female engineer and 20th employee and former CEO of Yahoo, mentioned that the internet has become more complex, making it harder for search engines to maintain search result quality.
Mayer explained: 'I do think the quality of the Internet has taken a hit.
'When I started at Google, there were about 30 million web pages, so crawling them all and indexing them all was relatively straightforward. It sounds like a lot, but it’s small. Today, I think there was one point where Google had seen more than a trillion URLs.'