A new year-long study on internet search engine results has rocked the librarian and information worlds: yes, Google really is getting worse.
The study from German researchers found “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright search engine optimization (SEO) product review spam.” The study evaluated 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, using product searches because they are “particularly vulnerable to affiliate marketing” and spam. The combination of affiliate marketing, SEO, and review spam muddies the waters, limiting a user’s ability to find useful and unbiased information on a product they consider purchasing.
How does this impact non-product searches? That’s yet to be studied in a similarly systematic way, but it is interesting to consider the implications of this study on other information seeking behavior online.
We already know that law students (and lawyers) often begin their research on Google. But what do we do if Google is overrun with affiliate marketing and spam and AI-generated content? Here’s the strategies I discuss with my Advanced Legal Research students:
Evaluate your search results to select the best information for your needs.
We use the CRAAP test to evaluate sources based on their currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. When affiliate marketing, spam, and AI materialize in a search, they’ll most drastically impact the last three factors, and most specifically purpose. Students should be on the lookout for a financial motivation for a website’s existence now more than ever.
Start on a trusted website.
If Google search results are compromised, consider skipping the Google search altogether and navigate directly to a different starting point like Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, or Justia, or Nolo’s Free Legal Encyclopedia, or Google Scholar, or even Wikipedia.
Look for a research guide.
Like starting on a specific website, students can tack “legal research guide” or “libguide” onto their Google search to get guides from law librarians, a trusted source of information.
Leverage SEOs with specific keyword selection.
My favorite Google tip is to add “USC” to search terms when trying to find a particular federal statute. When I search “Family Medical Leave Act” I’ll get results from the federal government and even a Google “answer box” with the Public Law and Statutes at Large citations and a reference to Title 29 in the U.S.C., but none of the results on the first page specifically give me a citation into a code section. Adding “USC” to the original search gets me into Title 29, Chapter 28 (after a featured result from the University of Southern California which I ignored).
Use Google’s Advanced Search feature.
Google supports many of the Boolean operators that our students are familiar with from legal research platforms. Students can use these to try and get around the above-referenced problem. Google’s Advanced Search also supports field searches like site or domain (my personal favorite for websites with awful internal search bars) and date filters. If AI-written articles and law blogs begin to proliferate, a date of before:2022 might help eliminate those results.
RIPS Law Librarian Blog 
Thanks for this. Unfortunately, I’ve found Google Advanced Search to also be unreliable as of late in running a set group of searches for a faculty member that used to bring up reliable results.