Quite likely underreporting affiliate links due to obfuscation like cloaking, hiding redirects behind javascript (they mention in the paper not rendering the pa

Quite likely underreporting affiliate links due to obfuscation like cloaking, hiding redirects behind javascript (they mention in the paper not rendering the page), using JS and a POST, other URL minifiers etc. One interesting solution to the problem is to have more than one dominant search engine and its algorithmic choices, having half a dozen web-scale engines with some variation at least gives the user a choice into other avenues of information discovery. (There isn't really much point in using Startpage and DDG here since they're effectively meta search engines of Google and Bing). For SEOs in English speaking countries there is not much point in thinking beyond pleasing Google. Clearly AI and whack-a-mole spam sites have been a problem for a while due to the prevalance of people tacking on 'reddit' to their query to find other humans talking about stuff.