It’s not just you. Google Search is getting worse

If you’ve started appending “Reddit” to every search-engine query you make, this bit of information may not surprise you: Google’s search results are getting worse.

That’s according to a new study by German researchers, who examined 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year. They found sites that ranked high in search results were far more likely to be of poor quality and geared towards affiliate marketing, where the sites receive commissions for driving purchases on websites like Amazon.

How it goes down: Per the researchers, search engines are basically locked in a cat and mouse game with spam and affiliate sites, who perform certain actions – like consistently registering and hosting content on new domains – in order to game the algorithms and rank highly in search results before eventually being discovered and taken down.

But, per the researchers, this quashing only results in "a temporary positive effect." Many of these sites are part of large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns – and, like in Whac-A-Mole, once you smack that puppy on the head it’ll always try to come back (especially if it’s making money).

👀 Looking ahead… The advent of generative AI, and its ability to crank out massive volumes of content, all but ensures the cat and mouse game will get harder for search engines.