[puranjay]

Google seems to have largely solved its biggest problem: spammy results. It's very hard to find sites in the top results for strong keywords with poor backlink profiles.

It has done this by a) Actually improving its spammy backlink detection, and b) Scary webmasters away from spammy SEO tactics through sudden updates like Panda/Penguin and straight up propaganda.

Once you solve the spam issue, Google's search results organically become better. Ergo, it doesn't need to spend that much time monitoring and improving them

[tyingq]

That's interesting, and would explain why no replacement was named for Matt.

I wonder how much they actually improved the webspam thing.

The search results you see today, versus years past, suggest a sort of "cheat" to do that...something like a seed set of trusted sites (big brands, universities, government sites, etc) , and weighting based on distance from those seeds.

I say that because I'll often get results that are heavy on authority, but low on relevance. What I'm looking for is on pages 2 and 3, on more niche, less prominent sites. It didn't used to be that way.