I can't help but wonder if this small change will upset the economic incentive to publish oceans of garbage onto the web. At the end of the day it's about the money, and the farms have a very good understanding of how much they can make off of their various "offerings".

What has been troublesome over the last two years is not so much that Google seemed to look the other way (until now), but that larger media companies like AOL and Yahoo were turning to this kind of behavior as a "viable" strategy for the future. It's amazing how many people will work for very, very little an hour writing garbage as opposed to minimum wage with possible tips at a restaurant. The allure of easy money has corrupted people's incentive from the top to the very bottom.

For once I see an actual way to compete with Google. Bing could outright ban sites that produce garbage and make their search results look pretty good by comparison. The question is whether Microsoft is willing to drop the pretense of objectivity to do so. Would users care? Would advertisers?