This paper does not make sense to me. They used Startpage (https://www.startpage.com https://www.startpage.com) as a proxy for Google results ("result pages of

This paper does not make sense to me. They used Startpage (https://www.startpage.com https://www.startpage.com) as a proxy for Google results ("result pages of Google (by proxy of Startpage)" in a discussion of Google results? Except, if you put the same search in Startpage and Google, you get different results. Image results especially are quite different. Text results were mostly just a reorganization on my quick tests. (Tried the title of the paper as its own search "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search") Edit: One other notable result is from Figure 3, that a huge percentage of the results now are Amazon and Youtube. Many orders of magnitude in most cases. Amazon (3000-4000), NYTimes (1000), Walmart (~500?), Insider/PCMag/Tomsguide (~50?)