I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK".
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.
When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.
My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.
Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.
In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.
Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews?
> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results.
Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.
Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
> w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.
I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.
What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.
You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:
1. w3schools
2. Mozilla's documentation
3. The Cambridge dictionary
4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology
5. More websites about the HTML term
I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.
But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue.
I haven't personally noticed any drop in results quality on Google in the decades I've used it.