Google is broken. It’s Amazon’s fault. The results provided by the search engine are increasingly polluted by websites with empty content, tailor-made to get to the top of the list of searched keywords and then get paid by Amazon for the visitors they send him.
The bad news is twofold. For Google, in any case: not only do the websites most likely to rank among its top search results often offer irrelevant content, but also when its engineers try to discourage this practice by modifying the search engine’s algorithms search, these same websites adapt on the spot and continue to supplant more legitimate sites.
And, of course, it’s the Internet users who pay for all this waste.
And if it’s serious for Google, it’s even more serious for the Internet in general, given its central place on the modern Web. In fact, the Californian search engine responded to 83.5% of all searches carried out by Internet users from all over the planet in 2023. And for most website owners, profitability requires high frequency visits from these same Internet users. The success of their model therefore relies on their ability to appear among the first search results provided by Google.
However, “many search engine users have been complaining for several years about the constantly declining quality of search results. This is attributed to the growing number of search engine-optimized websites with low-quality content,” four German academics wrote in a study published earlier this month titled Is Google getting worse? A longitudinal investigation of search engine pollution.
Researchers analyzed results provided by Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for 7,392 product review requests over a one-year period. Take the test: ask your favorite search engine for the best smartphone, best toaster, etc. Note the names of the websites that appear at the top of the search results. You’ll probably come to the same conclusion as these researchers: “Higher-ranked results are better optimized, include more affiliate links, and have lower quality content.” »
Google downplays the situation. The study only covers product comparisons, the Duty a spokesperson, which does not reflect the experience for the billions of other searches made each year on its site.
A question of money
The problem may be more serious than it seems. The reason ? Money, of course. These sites automatically – and inexpensively – generate fake reviews, then create an “affiliate hyperlink” to the product mentioned on Amazon, where people can purchase it directly.
For years, Amazon has used affiliate links to attract online shoppers. Once a purchase is made, Amazon returns a percentage of the price paid to the website the user came from. These affiliate links are much less common on legitimate sites than they are on deceptive sites, the German researchers found. “A small proportion of product review sites use affiliate links, but the majority of pages cited in search results do,” their study reads. “All search engines are victims of these large-scale affiliate link pollution campaigns. »
In other words, search engines recommend sites whose mechanics are expressly designed to thwart them and to make Internet users buy from online stores, mainly Amazon, which pay them for this practice.
These sites therefore have no interest in correctly informing Internet users.
The era of “post-SEO”?
This ability to rank websites favorably in search engine results has a name: it’s called SEO. We often talk about SEO, the English expression search engine optimization. There is an entire industry specializing in SEO. Many website owners — including many media outlets that provide free access to the online version of their content — rely heavily on good SEO to generate a vital portion of their revenue.
What the German researchers teach us in their study is that we have entered an era of “post-referencing”. As social media has brought about the “post-truth” era. Search engines are victims of their success: clever people have discovered the recipe for their magic sauce and are using the ingredients to deceive Internet users.
This is a major problem.
We no longer need to talk about the central place of the Internet in our daily lives — for information, for consumption, for getting an idea of the world around us. However, search engines are a central cog in the modern Internet – or at least on the Web, its most visible part. Those who remember the internet before Google, sometime in the early 2000s, may remember how finding the right website back then was like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack.
In short, if we can no longer trust Google, nor Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, the entire Internet is broken. And we risk collectively paying the price.