Another look under the hood of search

Am I the only one who really likes behind-the-scenes videos? Sometimes I enjoy them more than the actual products/movies.

Anyhow, it's great that Google is making constant improvements to its search but lately, I feel like the results aren't as good as they used to be because of SEO spam and people gaming the algorithm solely for profit.

What surprised me was the human element, I'd expected it to be more data-driven with less human debate.

What's the spin here? Google is trying to project:

    - Search is a hard, interesting problem - and we have really smart
      people working on it (come work with us).
    - Search is a competitive business (don't regulate us).
    - We use a scientific process (don't investigate our practices
      as a potential conflict of interest).

The video is interesting. But one thing NOT addressed is how much is the search experience improving? Yes, they've made "500 changes" to the algorithm last year. By what measure is search quality going up (or down)?

I sense an improvement over the last 6 months (seeing less low quality or spam links) - but I'd like to see this quantified.

I was expecting Sanjay Gupta to pop in!

Surprised to see that what appears to be the "feature launch committee" has about 30 people in the room... and another 15 or so patched in by video. (Perhaps most are just 'flies on the wall' to learn?)