I have to doubt that this is lack of technical ability. It must be a lack of will. If Google cared, it would be easy for them to spot the discontent that has b

I have to doubt that this is lack of technical ability. It must be a lack of will. If Google cared, it would be easy for them to spot the discontent that has been voiced in places like this, and they could easily build workarounds. Much of the spam results that users here are complaining about are easy to recognize for a human. Google could manually annotate their dataset to punish such sites. Also, don’t they have the data of how long searchers spend on each of those sites they visit? With that data, it should be easy to weed out the SEO spam. So I have to guess that the majority of users actually doesn’t care. For them, perhaps, what we call SEO spam is some kind of value added service that gives them the answer they were looking for. That it is a rip off of another, much more authoritative site seems to be something they either don’t recognize or don’t care about.