And then you call me a conspiracy theorist, immediately followed by a pretty insane conspiracy theory about Apple community. I'm not even an Apple fan.
What I meant to say was that I've seen many reports which show a large percentage of executives at Google to be engineers and programmers, although I can't find a link right now. However, I seriously doubt that Google engineers would have gone along without revolt down a slippery slope as the one implied in the original article.
The facts are
1) Google search results are full of spam.
2) Many of the spam sites have been reported (I reported a few myself) and blogged/written about for years.
What can one conclude from that? I think there are 2 possible explanations
1) It's not in Google's financial interests
2) Google is failing at filtering spam
I doubt it's true, because simply banning the top 1000 spammy domains would cut more than 99% of the search spam. It's something that an intern can do.
If Google wants a pure algorithmic solution instead, well, good luck to them. I think until AI is smarter than humans, such solution doesn't exist. Spammers can always find loopholes in algorithms.
It most likely a much simpler explanation: web results with content explicitly generated for a specific target search string is simply getting closer and closer to being actual genuine content, and thus harder and harder to differentiate and filter.