To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the ev

To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been...". On the other hand, you can't open an RSS reader today without tripping over someone griping about content farms polluting the search results. There are intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. Why such disparate viewpoints? As Matt's post suggests, it could simply be that people's expectations are rising -- search results are getting so good in general (which they are) that we notice the problems more. Or it could be that Google is focused on a narrow definition of "spam" that doesn't cover content farms. It could even be that both sides are "right" -- that overall search quality is rising even as the content farm problem worsens, if Google has been successfully reducing other causes of low search quality. I'd love to see some hard analysis of this. For instance, pick some a reasonably large set of sample queries, and show what the results looked like five years ago, and what they look like today. Of course, you'd first have to find a set of sample queries and results from five years ago.