In the current era of digitalization, search engines are full of spam content, according to a media source from a team of researchers in Germany. Nevertheless, with this, many Internet users are facing trouble accessing helpful information online, which is the core function of the Internet.
According to reports, researchers searched for product reviews that “offer tests and purchase recommendations.” Nevertheless, in the research, they spent almost a year analysing almost 7400 queries on three different search engines, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
Meanwhile, the baseline of their finding was search engines having “significant problems” with affiliate links. However, the number of product reviews online that contain affiliate links isn’t huge; hence, the researchers said these reviews are overrepresented in search engine results.
Meanwhile, the problem with the affiliate links was that they broke down to trust, said a researcher.
Since users often trust their search engines already, the affiliate inherits this trust as a byproduct of a high ranking” wrote the author. Nevertheless, this also brings out the conflict between affiliates, search providers, and users. This was because they are more likely to design web pages to increase their rankings; however, the opposite of investing in high-quality products.
Also Read – NASA Regains Contact With Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
Meanwhile, webpages that have more affiliate links and are more optimised are more likely to come up on search results, on average. They also “show signs of lower text quality” penned by an author.
On the other hand, the author said that as AI content continues to flood the Internet, search engine results will turn worse.
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.
Moreover, the researchers went on to say that affiliate marketing has played a role in how online content looks today. On the contrary, he also pointed out that getting completely rid of it might not be a good idea as many legitimate websites depend on it.
