Is it all AI's fault? More and more overseas users are abandoning Google and turning to TikTok and Reddit to search for answers

The arrival of the AI ​​tide has made several tech giants nervous, and Google is no exception. According to media reports, with the emergence of AI, there is an increasing amount of low-quality content in Google search results. More and more internet users are now abandoning Google search and turning to TikTok and Reddit for answers directly from other users.

Google Search Algorithm Has Been "Taken Over" by AI

It is understood that the internal workings of Google's search algorithm have always been a closely guarded secret, with many trying to understand its operation and profit from it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that help Google rank user content higher have been a lucrative skill.

However, now Google's search algorithm has been flooded by AI-driven SEO spam, preventing people from finding the content they are looking for. Content written by robots for robots is clogging up human search results, and AI-driven content factories are generating content at a speed unmatched by human writers.

This spam of low-quality content, optimized by AI, adapts to Google SEO in a way that surpasses any human-written content. Clicking on the current top search results will reveal low-quality content filled with errors and false information. However, the Google algorithm is unable to recognize this.

While Google has long held over 90% of the global search market, the fact that Google search results are deteriorating is no longer a secret. The battle between spam websites and Google algorithm developers has been ongoing for years. With the addition of AI, Google seems unable to keep up with the pace of development.

For example, a large-scale spam attack in December last year completely overwhelmed Google's algorithm, with spam leveraging key elements of the Google algorithm to suppress real search results. Of course, Google is trying to address this issue, but it seems to be a case of two steps forward, one step back, making users unable to trust Google to provide reliable answers.

Especially when users are looking for information on products they want to purchase, affiliate link spam consistently ranks higher than genuine information, and in large quantities. A Reddit user said, "I've noticed recently that Google search often doesn't show relevant results at all. I don't have ads, so it's not just feeding me ads. I used to search things on Google and the results would be perfect, then I had to start using things like 'this' to search for exact words, now, even that doesn't seem to work."

Another person said, "Every time I try to use Google, I get search results that have nothing to do with what I entered... For example, I would search for 'cat toothpaste,' and the first result is 'dog toothpaste.' I would use as many specific terms as possible to search for a topic, because apparently it's a niche topic, and I still get results that are not what I want."

Plagiarism and Low-Quality Content Flood the Entire Internet

A German research team has confirmed the authenticity of this issue. They found that all search engines, whether Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, have the same problem. All search engines are plagued by significant issues with highly optimized (affiliate) content, becoming victims of large-scale affiliate link spam activities In short, they found that search engines will provide a large amount of low-quality text with affiliate links. They will not prioritize content from credible sources that is well-written.

But this is not the worst part yet, the entire internet is going downhill. After the emergence of ChatGPT, AI robots began scraping content from the internet to train their models: human writing, art, images, and everything created by humans are indiscriminately copied, and then used to generate low-quality human-like writing.

However, SEO-optimized, AI-driven websites are taking this to a new level. For example, some "blog authors" publish hundreds of AI articles every day, but these provide no informational value, these junk articles are purely tailored to please the "robot god" that now controls the internet, and their sole task is to please the Google algorithm that favors "fresh" content. Robots are burying all human-written content under a deluge of AI junk.

Some media believe that the possible end result of all this is that robots will continue to write a large number of articles to please other robots.

Moreover, now we cannot even rely on Google News to push news from reliable sources. Sometimes, Google search will rank low-quality AI websites above genuinely high-quality news reports written by humans. And some sites don't even bother creating new AI content. Media reports indicate that AI will replicate articles published on credible websites and republish them on AI-driven content factories seconds after their initial publication on these trusted sites, using this stolen content to achieve high rankings on Google News.

Seeking Real Answers TikTok, Reddit Popular

This is not to say that Google is unaware that user trust is declining, although Google may be addressing this issue, AI tools are much faster than humans, and robots have no qualms about suppressing search engines and justifying this situation.

Therefore, with the proliferation of more and more junk articles and spam on the internet, people are turning back to seeking answers from humans, namely TikTok and Reddit. There, they can at least ask for genuine user opinions or see how they evaluate products.

Of course, this approach also has risks. Corporate companies can pay TikTok influencers a lot of money to promote inferior products in their videos, deceiving consumers. But it all depends on what consumers are willing to trust, as some would rather trust the wrong person than the wrong robot.

In addition, Reddit also cannot solve the problem of bot accounts spamming comments, but there are human moderators who can prevent and delete spam. However, human intervention is not absolutely safe, and it may take some time to find a solution to this problem. If there is anything positive in this whole dilemma, it is that people are returning to asking for human opinions. As trust in information on the internet is lost, in the end, people may only be able to go back to seeking advice from family and friends.