What hasn't gotten worse with Google? I have been slowly leaving Google and now it's just YouTube and Google maps. Youtube I am not overly worried about as I can still block all the commercials.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded.

After pouring over countless links for the past year, the team has concluded everyone complaining about Google's declining quality seems to be correct, and things are probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI - just like we predicted.

Along with that, the researchers determined that all three search engines are prone to being gamed by large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns, and their efforts to subvert such manipulation through algorithm updates have, at best, "a temporary positive effect."

Google even claimed in 2022 that it was updating its algorithm to prioritize "people-first content," but as the researchers found, those efforts have been in vain as SEO experts and spam factories have simply figured out how to game the newest tweaks to the system.

Janek Bevendorff, research assistant at Leipzig University and an author on the paper, told The Register that it's hard to say whether there's an easy way out of the current online search predicament in which we find ourselves.

"Affiliate marketing itself is in part responsible for what online content looks like now," Bevendorff said, but noted that "banning it entirely is probably not a solution," as many authentic sites use the tactic, and SEO optimization, as an important revenue stream.

The original article contains 748 words, the summary contains 242 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Why just Google? Search has gone into the gutter across the board. Certain search constraints like excluding keywords or sites no longer work. Amazon doesn't even care what you type in - they just show you what they want you to buy.

Headline’s a little misleading; the thrust of the story is that every search engine is getting worse under the absolutely crushing weight of SEO gaming the system, and they note:

Google's targeting of SEO and affiliate spam appears to be the most effective, the team found.

If you don't mind paying to use a search engine, Kagi is actually pretty good. Not as good as Google was 20 years ago, but significantly better than any other search engine I can find today.