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Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search [pdf]

276 点作者 DanielleMolloy超过 1 年前

49 条评论

iteratethis超过 1 年前
I don&#x27;t understand Google anymore.<p>Surely people can relate to the situation where you end up on an article based on some technical query you have. The article repeats your question 7 times, has endless casually-related filler text that still does not answer the question and then ends with: try to unplug it.<p>It is so freaking obvious that it&#x27;s a malicious content farm, but Google with all of its technical might seem unable or unwilling to detect it. If tech can&#x27;t do it, organize some type of curation or feedback?<p>Same for image search. You search for &quot;red flower Thailand&quot; and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. The idea that Google is spectacularly good at subject detection from imagery does not seem to actually work out in practice.<p>Most people&#x27;s search queries consist of just 2-3 words. Nowadays Google consistently just drops the last word as if it knows better than I do what I need.<p>High value elaborate articles on various topics do not rank. Instead, dated articles do. You have to manually bookmark high quality content as you see it, because you&#x27;ll never find it back via search.<p>Is everybody asleep at Google? This is not a small thing, this is your bread and butter. Teens are using Tiktok for search, you&#x27;re in real trouble and better start cleaning up your act.
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pants2超过 1 年前
&gt; We find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. [...] We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns.<p>I think this is an excellent methodology for testing the quality of search results. I would love to see a standard search engine test and scoring system based on this, maybe similar to some of the LLM scoring systems.
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jsnell超过 1 年前
I don&#x27;t know, feels like a paper titled &quot;Is Google Getting Worse&quot; could have benefited from actually looking at Google results rather than only results of other search engines.<p>Edit: This got downvoted to hell, so let me be more explicit. This study did not look at Google results, the title is pure clickbait. They used Startpage results as a proxy for Google results. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a valid assumption, even if Startpage is using Google&#x27;s index.
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Gud超过 1 年前
Yes. Google used to be amazing, then it turned into an advertisement company. Slowly at first, then about a decade ago the pace increased.<p>But the worst part is, Google SEO has infected the entire web and made it into complete garbage. Hopefully, this last decade or so will just be a blip before we return to baseline, where it can be wild and free again.
101008超过 1 年前
Are there stats* of Google Search across the years? I felt I don&#x27;t use Google as much as I used to. And it isn&#x27;t because &quot;I know more stuff&quot;, but mainly because the way we use internet has changed. I wonder if kids or teens (who most of them don&#x27;t know how to use an email inbox) would use Google... (I guess yeah?)<p>* Of course, the stats should include the total amount of internet users globally, or normalize the amount of searches based on that...
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charlotte-fyi超过 1 年前
It&#x27;s not worse when you append site:reddit.com to every single search but this is only a function of the fact that reddit can&#x27;t figure out how to build their own search. Outside of maybe programming stuff where I&#x27;ll still click on links, I don&#x27;t think google has driven me organically to a new site in years.
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barbazoo超过 1 年前
Kagi allows users to adjust the ranking [0] of certain domains. I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s shared among all users but it would certainly help.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.kagi.com&#x2F;kagi-features" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.kagi.com&#x2F;kagi-features</a>
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ricardo81超过 1 年前
Quite likely underreporting affiliate links due to obfuscation like cloaking, hiding redirects behind javascript (they mention in the paper not rendering the page), using JS and a POST, other URL minifiers etc.<p>One interesting solution to the problem is to have more than one dominant search engine and its algorithmic choices, having half a dozen web-scale engines with some variation at least gives the user a choice into other avenues of information discovery. (There isn&#x27;t really much point in using Startpage and DDG here since they&#x27;re effectively meta search engines of Google and Bing). For SEOs in English speaking countries there is not much point in thinking beyond pleasing Google.<p>Clearly AI and whack-a-mole spam sites have been a problem for a while due to the prevalance of people tacking on &#x27;reddit&#x27; to their query to find other humans talking about stuff.
gniv超过 1 年前
It seems that the answer from their study is mostly no (reading the conclusion), but they seem reluctant to admit it, so they focus mostly on results being mediocre and spammy.
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tambourine_man超过 1 年前
I visited a small country in my last vacation. I ended up bringing a bit of money back because I was in a hurry I thought it would be easy to exchange back at home, even at worse rates. I live in a big city after all. Of course, I was very wrong.<p>I spent an afternoon Googling every possible incantation only to get useless AI generated text, travel agency sites or simply unrelated content.<p>I was about to accept my loss when I tried Kagi. The first page showed an exchange that accepted the currency. Very far from me and with terrible rates, but still.<p>Anecdata and all, but the fact is that I&#x27;m using Kagi more and more and it&#x27;s winning my trust and good will fast.
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ado__dev超过 1 年前
Anecdotally, yes.<p>Google search for topics I&#x27;m unfamiliar with&#x2F;wanting to learn about all lead to low quality, SEO-optimized to hell, clik-baity sites that are just riddled with ads. I have to add &quot;reddit&quot; to most searches just to find semi-relevant content.<p>But Google search for topics i&#x27;m super familiar with and just need a transactional search to look something up tend to be much better and generally the fastest way to accomplish a task.
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fuzztester超过 1 年前
Yes, Google is getting worse, and was already abysmal, from some years back.<p>In <i>longitude</i>, latitude, and by many other measures :)<p>Plenty of earlier posts and comments about that on HN, for many years now. What&#x27;s so surprising or new about that, then?<p>As the saying goes, it&#x27;s news if a man bites a dog, but not the other way around - <i>dog</i>gone it if I know why, <i>man</i> ...
delta_p_delta_x超过 1 年前
Consider using ublacklist[1]. I don&#x27;t see SEO junk like Pinterest, Tutorialspoint, Javatpoint, geeksforgeeks, etc at all in my searches.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iorate&#x2F;ublacklist">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iorate&#x2F;ublacklist</a>
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guhcampos超过 1 年前
We&#x27;re back to the pre-Google era and suddenly I&#x27;m aggressively bookmarking stuff like it&#x27;s 1995.
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NelsonMinar超过 1 年前
I wonder if &quot;affiliate links&quot; is a reasonable proxy for page quality? I wouldn&#x27;t use it directly in a ranking function but it might be a nice automated way to estimate whether results are good.
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summerlight超过 1 年前
I don&#x27;t know if the overall search quality has degraded or not, but SEO has been become definitely a much more severe issue than ever before. Google is the main target for this attack for obvious reasons but no other search engines are really immune to this. I&#x27;m skeptical if this can be tackled by any technical solutions; the problem is not just a specific type of SEO spamming but the structure where the enemies are constantly optimizing against your fundamental goal.
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KorematsuFredt超过 1 年前
Google is better than Bing and anything else for my day today work. Few things I miss though :<p>1. Spam is more than in past. The outrage porn, clickbait headlines etc. are lot more than in past.<p>2. Dominance of few domains despite poor quality content. For lot of coding related queries, dev.to, hashnode etc. appear in top results despite being clearly spammy.<p>3. Paywalled content. Most irritating part is sites like medium which appear in top results, have high value content and yet are behind paywall.<p>Internet is growing and so are Google&#x27;s problems but I think they are still on top of things.
araes超过 1 年前
This paper does not make sense to me. They used Startpage (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startpage.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startpage.com</a>) as a proxy for Google results (&quot;result pages of Google (by proxy of Startpage)&quot; in a discussion of Google results?<p>Except, if you put the same search in Startpage and Google, you get different results. Image results especially are quite different. Text results were mostly just a reorganization on my quick tests. (Tried the title of the paper as its own search &quot;Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search&quot;)<p>Edit: One other notable result is from Figure 3, that a huge percentage of the results now are Amazon and Youtube. Many orders of magnitude in most cases. Amazon (3000-4000), NYTimes (1000), Walmart (~500?), Insider&#x2F;PCMag&#x2F;Tomsguide (~50?)
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frantic2821超过 1 年前
I knew I wasn&#x27;t the only one thinking this lol - glad it&#x27;s proven by an investigation How does one think Google is planning to change it&#x27;s ranking system?
jay_kyburz超过 1 年前
I have a few questions for Google employees..<p>Are you allowed to search the internet with an ad blocker installed?<p>Do you use a special search interface that doesn&#x27;t return results with ads?
gumballindie超过 1 年前
It is. My suspicion is that they are using ai for search results considering how inreliable it&#x27;s become. That&#x27;s why searching for &quot;sinus inflammation&quot; used to yield results for penis inflammation for a while. That one seems to have been resolved. However I am still getting completely unrelated results every now and then, indicating they are having serious unresolved search engine issues.
synthc超过 1 年前
Google&#x27;s search quality has been going down the drain for years. I get more and more fake wikipedia and stack overflow SEO results and I use it less and less. Can&#x27;t wait until some search oriented LLM company replaces it.
maxglute超过 1 年前
I wonder what percent of wiki entries are being taken over by AI writing. I feel like I wouldn&#x27;t know with wiki style language. There was at least a few TV tropes entries that I suspected, only because the humor and observation felt off.
wkjagt超过 1 年前
To me it feels like they prepend every search query with “where to buy”. Or when I ask for more specific things, like “cheap used Linux laptop”, it goes like naaaah, surely you mean “best laptops you can buy in 2024”.
alfiedotwtf超过 1 年前
As long as Pinterest keeps coming up on my search results, the answer is yes!
nhggfu超过 1 年前
well Google NEWS certainly seems to be absolutely OWNED by spammers of late.<p>eg just yesterday - a search for the NYSE listed company &quot;betmgm&quot; on google news [US] yielded 100 spam results [affiliate offers + bonus codes for BETMGM sportsbook]- and not one real non-commercial, non-spam news post concerning the company.<p>[data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamblingindustrynews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;affiliates&#x2F;google-news-100-percent-gambling-spam&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gamblingindustrynews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;affiliates&#x2F;google-news...</a> ]
dimitrios1超过 1 年前
I am not sure if Google has empirically gotten worse or not, but I do know that I very often have to use multiple search engines more often than not now in order to find the information I am looking for.
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charlieyu1超过 1 年前
The worst thing Google allow phishing sites in sponsors. There are many cases of people searching for a website and lands on the phishing site instead, getting credit card details stolen.
webworker超过 1 年前
Okay. That&#x27;s it. I&#x27;ve f&#x27;n had it with search sucking. Reading these comments is just demoralizing. We don&#x27;t have to live like this, and we won&#x27;t.<p>Stay tuned here on HN.
AlienRobot超过 1 年前
&gt;The study finds an inverse relationship between a page’s optimization level and its perceived expertise<p>What if Google flipped its SEO weights from positive to negative?
Alifatisk超过 1 年前
I wish I could access old Google again, where the results made sense and searching wasn’t infiltrated with AI.
rickdg超过 1 年前
Google is a clear case for why you should pick a service because of it&#x27;s business model.
jeffbee超过 1 年前
Oh, what a methodology. They ran with the meme of &quot;best pants&quot; having bad results, when the problem with &quot;best pants&quot; is that it&#x27;s a nonsense query. I personally cannot recall ever doing a &quot;best pants&quot; query, and the results of such queries don&#x27;t factor into whether I think a search engine is good.
GoToRO超过 1 年前
Today I searched for a product, google found a local site with the item, I clicked on the link and I was redirected to aliexpress. How they can not catch this?
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vlark超过 1 年前
The TL;DR = Not really, according to our methods &amp; analysis. But maybe.
animanoir超过 1 年前
I’ m worried about Gmail.
edpichler超过 1 年前
I switched to Duckduckgo as a default search engine for a year and I never needed to come back. More diverse results, fewer ads, and less SEO hacking. I think Google dropped the ball. This topic is becoming common in HN.
andai超过 1 年前
Tried using Google Bard. It gave me complete nonsense. It cited the sources for the nonsense, so I checked them: AI generated SEO spam pages. Gave me a good laugh.<p>(By comparison, Phind gave the correct answer, and high quality sources.)
animanoir超过 1 年前
Yes.
jsheard超过 1 年前
Google Images is filling up with AI slop to the point of unusability for some purposes, even content that isn&#x27;t actively engaging in SEO shenanigans is getting pushed to the top. In some cases even the key image that Google displays first on a normal search is fake, like when searching for the &quot;tank man&quot; prioritized showing a fake AI selfie from the mans perspective. It&#x27;s still there in fact, just not the first result anymore, but Google might have demoted it manually after the backlash.<p>Looking to browse works by a specific artist? Good luck, Google evidently can&#x27;t tell the difference between a genuine J. C. Leyendecker piece and anything shat out by a &quot;Leyendecker style&quot; image generation model. Search for &quot;Yoji Shinkawa&quot; and this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;RYghaoY.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;RYghaoY.png</a> is currently the first thing you see, which isn&#x27;t even close to his style, but Google has somehow determined it&#x27;s the image that best represents him. The full images page shows his actual work but interspersed about half-and-half with AI imitations.<p>My speculation is that Google prioritizes showing <i>recent</i> results, presumed to be the freshest most up-to-date information, but of course for a historical event like Tiananmen Square or an artist who died in 1951, <i>nearly all of the fresh results past a certain point are AI simulacra.</i>
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FirmwareBurner超过 1 年前
What&#x27;s Google&#x27;s incentive to be &quot;good&quot; now?<p>They own the search market anyway, and the more time you waste on their platform searching for what you want to find, the more ads you see and the more money Google makes.<p>What else are those 97% people gonna do, &quot;Google on Bing&quot; instead?<p>So for them, being bad is actually more profitable than being good, meaning there&#x27;s a conflict of interest between what Google provides and what their users want, but since there&#x27;s basically no equivalent competition, they get away with it laughing all the way to the bank.
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miyuru超过 1 年前
I recently caught myself that I unconsciously retry my google searches by adding more keywords. I also noticed that small sites, blogs, forums are gone from google searches.<p>Now I am using 3 search engines.<p>Bing for Normal searches. Google for local(country) searches. Yandex for small sites, blogs, forums.
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hotep99超过 1 年前
One of my biggest complaints about Google is the prioritization of pop culture slop over everything else. I feel like I&#x27;m frequently getting auto-corrected because some Netflix show is titled with a pun of a phrase or there is a dramatization of some historical figure that Google considers more relevant than the real person.
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ben30超过 1 年前
I&#x27;ve noticed a pattern with &#x27;free&#x27; services like Facebook and now Google. With simple tasks like checking emails or finding phone numbers in contacts, there&#x27;s no friction. However, Facebook lost my trust long ago as it seemed more focused on capturing my attention for ad revenue, leading to time wastage.<p>I initially trusted Google for its efficient and seemingly fair service, where smart ad-targeting was the price for speed. But now, Google feels similar to Facebook; it&#x27;s harder to switch to alternatives like Kagi on iPhone due to financial ties with Apple.<p>This shift in Google&#x27;s approach, prioritizing trapping attention over genuine service, is frustrating. I&#x27;d rather pay for a search service that values my time and provides real utility, than endure the hidden costs of &#x27;free&#x27; services.
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foofoo4u超过 1 年前
Google, YouTube, etc., they&#x27;re all getting worse. I&#x27;m finding it ever more difficult to learn anything anymore from the internet. Whether it&#x27;s learning how to play the guitar, how to fish, weight lifting or how to do mostly anything, I get trash results. Google results are exclusively shallow content, most of which are trying to sell me on something. YouTube is full of short videos with click baity subjects entirely irrelevant to what I actually entered: &quot;Don&#x27;t make this {topic} mistake!&quot;, &quot;This one trick will make you better at {topic}!&quot;, &quot;Top 10 ways to become a pro at {topic} in two weeks!&quot;.<p>Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of society, I&#x27;ve naturally gravitated towards books. Books are leagues better in terms of quality of content. They are more detailed and thorough. It&#x27;s a richer experience so far.
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bunsenhoneydew超过 1 年前
I gave up on Google a couple of years ago. I used DDG for a while but often had to jump back (!g) to Google for some things. Now I pay for Kagi (been a year or two) and there’s no going back for me. I hardly ever even need to scroll down to find what I need, it’s just there. Saves me so much time.
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pembrook超过 1 年前
Google created this problem by slurping up all advertising money from open web activity for themselves.<p>The more market share of online display advertising they gained, the worse their results got.<p>Why? Because the only way to have a large volume of authentic content being produced at scale is to have a healthy ecosystem of independent sites that are profitable based on display ads.<p>As much as HN-types hate advertising, it was literally the only thing that made the web of yesteryear so special. Things like Adsense enabled blogs on tons of niche topics to be monetized and thus we had better open web content.<p>When Google decided there was more money to be made off ads before you even clicked on a search result, that ironically was what ended up killing search.<p>Now the only way to monetize content from search is via shill company blogs, affiliate marketing listicles (10 best dog toys), etc. So that’s what we get.<p>For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is.
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iancmceachern超过 1 年前
It&#x27;s AI, people using it vs not. And the AI is ever changing, trained on the internet, so it will be a self fulfilling constructive interference thing. If people keep using AI to write articles based on their competitors websites, eventually it will just be ai talking to ai.
nostromo超过 1 年前
Google search went from critical for me to irrelevant overnight with ChatGPT 4.<p>Like, literally irrelevant. I&#x27;m still watching YouTube, using Gmail, and occasionally checking out something on Google Shopping if I want to find something locally instead of on Amazon. But I use Google search about 90% less now than I did a year ago.