Enshittification is Real

Is anyone surprised that  web search engines are complete pants these days?

Google does not care, it doesn't have to, it's the monopoly search provider:

No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded.

The boffins made their determination after spending a year reviewing results for 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, which they said is the first systematic review into the question of worsening search engine result quality.

After poring over countless links for the past year, the team has concluded everyone complaining about Google's declining quality seems to be correct, and things are probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI - just like we predicted. See the above-linked study for the full details, including comparisons between Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google.

"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality," the researchers wrote. They also found that while a small portion of product reviews use affiliate marketing, the majority of search engine results do use the tactic, which is only adding to the problem of glum search engine results page (SERP) quality.

They got a reply from Google about this, and it's the standard PR bullshit.

"This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day," a Google spokesperson told The Register post-publication.

"We’ve launched specific improvements to address these issues – and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest."

Yes, there are more people who are more aggressively and more competently working to game the system for personal game, but Google hasn't looked beyond its latest quarterly they bought out Doubleclick in 2008.