I agree that spamdexing is a huge problem, but could the rise of rel="nofollow" contribute just as much? The vast majority of user-generated content is marked a

I agree that spamdexing is a huge problem, but could the rise of rel="nofollow" contribute just as much? The vast majority of user-generated content is marked as nofollow, but this is largely the same type of content that made early Google good. I often get better results doing a reddit search than using a search engine. It seems that by ignoring user-created links, search engines are ignoring 90-99% of the signal. The rest of the signal is mostly from commercial and promotional sites, so it's not surprising that these make up nearly all of the top search results. I often do want results from commercial sites such as nginx.com, but I want results that real people have found valuable and not results that some paid blog post linked to.