Is Google getting worse? Why critics say ads, spam sites are killing search - New York Post

Is Google search getting worse? From viral TikTok videos to posts on techie forums, frustrated users seem to think so.

They say that Google’s search results are increasingly stuffed with paid ads — and argue that spam sites are getting better at pushing themselves up in search results by gaming the company’s algorithms.

The end result is that Google’s search is gradually deteriorating, critics say, becoming less helpful and more annoying even as it remains the primary tool more than 4 billion people use to search the internet.

“If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to s—t,” Dmitri Kyle Brereton, a software engineer and writer, wrote in a blog post that rocketed to the top of influential Silicon Valley forum Hacker News in February. “Google is dead.”

Ads and spam

For example, imagine someone who works from home is looking for a new laptop.

If they go to Google and search “best laptop for working from home,” ads for Microsoft, LG and Capital One take up the entire screen. Scroll down past yet another ad for Dell, and they’ll reach the first non-sponsored link to a bizarre website called corporateshields.com.

The article, which is written by a faceless author named Patricia and is itself overrun with advertisements, appears to have gamed Google’s algorithm by repeating keywords over and over again, including the phrase “laptop” 155 times, “remote work” 14 times and “working from home”...

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