[cwyers]

What is their job? I thought it was as a search engine. So, let me ask -- when people steal blog content, what are their motives for doing so? Is it to deliver that content to you, the reader? Or is it to get Google hits? How well are they preserving links, illustrations, reader comments (which are a disaster a lot of places but not all of them), an archive of other work by the same author that may be of interest? How often are they slipping undesirable things (ads that lead to sites that offer malware, for instance) alongside the content they're stealing?

If Google wants to be the best search engine possible, returning the original result for an article relevant to the user's query is a better result than returning some second-hand copy littered with low-quality ad junk. And if that's not Google job, then let me know whose job it is and I'll start using them instead.