A study earlier this year by German academics verified what many users of Google search had long suspected: the search engine, once the gold standard for such.
In brief: It’s not your imagination: Google Search has gotten progressively worse over the years and at least one study confirms it. But until now most of us believed this was due to some corporate strategy hatched in a room full of executives. Not so, writes Edward Zitron, pointing the finger at Prabhakar Raghavan.
A study earlier this year by German academics verified what many users of Google search had long suspected: the search engine, once the gold standard for such activities, had been getting worse. The reason, the researchers concluded, is that too much low-quality content was being optimized to appear higher in search results than information of higher caliber. This was due to popular online marketing strategies such as affiliate marketing, which incentivizes the mass production of such content to maximize clicks.
The study, which came from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, also analyzed results from the Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines, noting that Google performed better than its counterparts in several key areas.
