This is the best summary I could come up with:

These days, search engine results are filled with spam content, according to a new paper from a team of researchers in Germany.

And it’s making it harder for people to access helpful information online — the core function of the internet.

Though webpages that have more affiliate links and are more optimized are more likely to come up in search results, on average, they also “show signs of lower text quality,” the researchers said.

And as content generated by AI continues to flood the internet, the researchers said search engine results are likely to get worse.

“Affiliate marketing itself is in part responsible for what online content looks like now,” Janek Bevendorff, a research assistant at Leipzig University and coauthor on the paper, told The Register.

“Banning it entirely is probably not a solution” since many legitimate websites rely on affiliate marketing and SEO optimization as an important revenue stream, Bevendorff told the outlet.

The original article contains 402 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Sadly haven’t found a search engine that beats it

*Search engine optimization spam. Spamming your bings and duck duck go won’t do anything.

I left everything google makes long ago, and I haven’t had any problem.

I’ve noticed that using more advanced syntax helps to alleviate the issue, in both DDG and Google. Specially apostrophes (to force exact terms) and the minus (to remove results containing a certain word or expression).

Paywall article. Please copy and paste.

We come in the situation that communities like this one here become more and more important since nobody can stop the SEO.

Friendly users will help you with usefull links. I know, many people has made bad experience with internet trolls or just echo chamber but his wasn’t the case anytime.

We are in a kind of “new usenet”.

Google has become even more worse because of all the sponsored content.

Here come the totally organic Kagi users to tell us paying for search is worth it. Use DDG or anything else that’s free.

Block or Highlight Search Engine Results - addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/

Takes some doing, but anytime you see a link to a garbage website that you don’t care to ever see again, add it to the shit-list. You’ll get better and better results the more you use it. Works on quite a few search engines.

addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/…/ublacklist/

Duckduckgo.com

IMHO, the problem with Google isn’t SEO. It’s Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the ‘engagement algorithm’ Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn’t search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I’m trying to find and that’s exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it’s still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn’t include what I searched for.

It’s actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn’t their most important product. And it’s been slow downhill ever since.

I’ve been pretty happy with SearxNG as a stand-in as it collates from multiple search engines.