I dislike the original study, since it repeatedly (including the title) makes claims about Google results, but in reality the researchers did not analyze Google results due to scraping Google being too hard. Instead they analyzed results scraped from a search engine, and assert with no proof that they're representative of Google results.
But this 404 article is even worse. The conclusion of the study wasn't tha the results have gotten worse. It was literally the opposite!
> In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam.
But just like the researchers got more attention with the misleading title about what was studied, the journalists at 404 got more clicks by outright lying about the results.
>But this 404 article is even worse. The conclusion of the study wasn't tha the results have gotten worse. It was literally the opposite!
> In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam.
> But just like the researchers got more attention with the misleading title about what was studied, the journalists at 404 got more clicks by outright lying about the results.
There are some questions if the scraping via Startpage is messing with the result. They are using the Google crawler, but their anonymisation might mess with the results.
I don't agree with you interpretation of the result though. if we take a look on a longer excerpt of the conclusion, they do mention multiple times that the quality is getting lower:
> Although we cannot predict the rank of individual pages, at the population level, 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*
and even the part you quoted goes on to mention a downward trend:
>In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam. Yet, we can still find several spam domains and also see an *overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines*, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement.
> > Although we cannot predict the rank of individual pages, at the population level, 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
As far as I can tell, that's not a claim about variance over time, i.e. about results being worse now than in the past. It's a claim about how the current population of pages and their current ranks, i.e. a page ranking higher is likely to be more SEO-optimized than a page ranking lower. It makes no claim about whether that was the case in the past, and if it was, whether it was true to a larger or lesser extent.
> Yet, we can still find several spam domains
They would have been able to find several spam domains at the start of their study, five years ago, ten years ago, or fifteen years ago. This statement is just totally empty when talking about whether the results are getting worse over time or not.
> and also see an overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement.
Sure. Did you check on what their definition of "text quality" is? I tried to, but couldn't since the paper never actually states it. But the only thing they actually report temporal statistics for is the "type-token ratio". Sounds fancy! What it turns out to be is "the number of unique words on page / number of total words on page".
That doesn't seem like a very strong claim about actual quality, especially when the only statistics they report is the 95th percentile.
Even if there were some kind of AI search on the horizon that would completely dispense with the shitty, SEO-bolstered sites (the faux-web) Google, etc. would still find a way to post-process or bootstrap their ads into the results.
I wonder if it will be possible in the near future for a "collective" or "org" to hoist their own search engine paid for by donations. Something to complete a Wikipedia/Archive.org triumvirate and usher in Web 1.5.
Hopefully more like archive.org and less like Wikipedia or the search results will be as badly biased as most Wikipedia topics are which are even tangentially related to politically contentious subjects.
It doesn't take a genius to see that if you build a product in which people can artificially boost their rank, you're gonna get a whole lot of shit. From the get-go SEO's concept has been to inflate the value of the content with _optimizations_. You can't be surprised when you design your product with the optimization being more effective than having legit content at its core.
I would argue that it's not only Google that got worse, the whole web got worse. I wish for a search engine that would exclude any website that is overleaded with ads. The side effect would be better quality content.
The Register I can anticipate giving me a clickbait headline, but I'm a little sad that 404 media is choosing to go that way.
They are relatively new and have an opportunity to choose the tone they want to set, and there's already enough clickbait on the internet. Claiming Google search has gotten worse and then following up with the immediate next sentence indicating that the study showed that search is worse across the board is a bad look.
The main problem researchers found is that the content quality has deteriorated. There is more spam now. However, Google is doing a better job at filtering low quality content than anyone else.
I've been working on a side project to filter spammy content and get straight to the point answers: Https://AskPandi.com
Readit News
I dislike the original study, since it repeatedly (including the title) makes claims about Google results, but in reality the researchers did not analyze Google results due to scraping Google being too hard. Instead they analyzed results scraped from a search engine, and assert with no proof that they're representative of Google results.
But this 404 article is even worse. The conclusion of the study wasn't tha the results have gotten worse. It was literally the opposite!
> In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam.
But just like the researchers got more attention with the misleading title about what was studied, the journalists at 404 got more clicks by outright lying about the results.
> In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam.
> But just like the researchers got more attention with the misleading title about what was studied, the journalists at 404 got more clicks by outright lying about the results.
There are some questions if the scraping via Startpage is messing with the result. They are using the Google crawler, but their anonymisation might mess with the results.
I don't agree with you interpretation of the result though. if we take a look on a longer excerpt of the conclusion, they do mention multiple times that the quality is getting lower:
> Although we cannot predict the rank of individual pages, at the population level, 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*
and even the part you quoted goes on to mention a downward trend:
>In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam. Yet, we can still find several spam domains and also see an *overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines*, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement.
As far as I can tell, that's not a claim about variance over time, i.e. about results being worse now than in the past. It's a claim about how the current population of pages and their current ranks, i.e. a page ranking higher is likely to be more SEO-optimized than a page ranking lower. It makes no claim about whether that was the case in the past, and if it was, whether it was true to a larger or lesser extent.
> Yet, we can still find several spam domains
They would have been able to find several spam domains at the start of their study, five years ago, ten years ago, or fifteen years ago. This statement is just totally empty when talking about whether the results are getting worse over time or not.
> and also see an overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement.
Sure. Did you check on what their definition of "text quality" is? I tried to, but couldn't since the paper never actually states it. But the only thing they actually report temporal statistics for is the "type-token ratio". Sounds fancy! What it turns out to be is "the number of unique words on page / number of total words on page".
That doesn't seem like a very strong claim about actual quality, especially when the only statistics they report is the 95th percentile.
I wonder if it will be possible in the near future for a "collective" or "org" to hoist their own search engine paid for by donations. Something to complete a Wikipedia/Archive.org triumvirate and usher in Web 1.5.
They are relatively new and have an opportunity to choose the tone they want to set, and there's already enough clickbait on the internet. Claiming Google search has gotten worse and then following up with the immediate next sentence indicating that the study showed that search is worse across the board is a bad look.
I've been working on a side project to filter spammy content and get straight to the point answers: Https://AskPandi.com