Janek Bevendorff, Matti Wiegmann, Martin Potthast, Benno Stein: Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines. Leipzig March 2024 untersuchen, wie sich die Qualität der Suchergebnisse durch SEO-Spam verschlechtert hat. „We monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries. Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content—more than is representative for the entire web according to a baseline retrieval system on the ClueWeb22. Focussing on the product review genre, we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. Of all affiliate networks, Amazon Associates is by far the most popular. We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns. However, we also notice that the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention.“