It's not every day that Google makes an announcement like this. On Tuesday, March 5, the web giant presented several changes to the algorithm that organizes the results of its search engine. The aim was "to help us reduce the amount of content that is unhelpful and of poor quality, and increase the number of useful results," Elizabeth Tucker, the search engine's product manager, explained to Le Monde.
Without mentioning them, the tech giant company seems to be trying to answer critics who have been wondering for months, even years, why the results offered by Goolge are of increasingly lower quality – like the NBC journalist who asked on February 24: "Has anybody finally had enough and quit Google search?"
Countless posts from users wondering why their search results don't seem as good as they used to can be found on Reddit. "Using Google once felt like magic," wrote The Atlantic last September, lamenting an era that seems long gone. "Now you find a bunch of stuff that are either ads or have figured out how to game the search rankings in such a way that you're just frustrated," added specialist site 404 Media.
Worse still, while Google is increasingly transforming itself into an "answer engine," as Olivier Ertzscheid, lecturer in information science at Nantes University, put it, it sometimes even comes up with false results, like the one offered to a Le Monde journalist when she was doing a search on the French education minister, below – Nicole Belloubet is the correct answer. Such errors are all the more notable given that Google has entered the race for generative artificial intelligence (AI), known for regularly "hallucinating" its results.
'All search engines have a problem'
The examples of approximate or shoddy answers – listed here and there and primarily in technophile spheres – have been met with an absence of scientific scrutiny until now. But in January, an article appeared from researchers at the Universities of Leipzig and Weimar titled "Is Google getting worse?" The study, which focused on product reviews, notes that "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality".
"All search engines, including Google, have a problem," one of the authors explained to Le Monde. "We can see that when Google makes an update, the search results improve for one or two weeks, generally. Then, gradually, they deteriorate again."
Google doesn't share this view. In a response sent to the site 404 Media, it accuses the study of having "looked narrowly at product review content" and of not "[reflecting] the overall quality and helpfulness of Search." More broadly, in the case currently pitting it against the US government, the company recently claimed that the quality of its results had "continuously improved over its 25 years" and that it "unceasingly strives to better its search quality".
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