[jkent]

I switched from AltaVista because Google.com was faster and less full of spam. I still think that is the case compared to other search engines for common searches.

That being said, more and more searches are using ever increasing numbers of search term words, and that can get spammy.

Google make no secret of investing in search and the presence here of Matt Cutts is testament to the fact that we(?) are listening, with very frequent algorithmic tweaks and responses.

I don't feel it's useful comparing Facebook's "like" system with a search engine. Whilst it is useful to know what friends think of things, this can also be gamed by smart marketers.

I don't think it sucks - but there are use cases and perhaps for certain users where the experience indeed sucks. I for one have been using the 'spam flag' extension for Chrome and feel that something can be done with the results. Perhaps this will help?

(my opinions are my own and not necessarily that of my employer).

[dhimes]

more and more searches are using ever increasing numbers of search term words, and that can get spammy

Why is that? I thought more words would give more focussed, less spammy results.

On another point it seems to me that Google would have to tread carefully here if the set of spammers has a large intersection with the set of folks who buy advertising from Google. I would (however naively) suspect this might be the case.

[_delirium]

> Why is that? I thought more words would give more focussed, less spammy results.

I've noticed that if you use too many words, you more often end up with keyword-stuffed or aggregated/scraped pages, because they just happen to use all the words in your search query on the same page. Sometimes this is because there aren't actually any real results for the particular narrow niche you wanted, but sometimes it's just because none of the real results use all of the keywords you tried verbatim, and Google wasn't able to figure out that those non-verbatim matches were more relevant than the exact-match-but-crap pages (admittedly a hard problem).

[dhimes]

Ah, I see what you mean. These link farms are getting clever, and using content "real" enough to pass the automated sniff test.

[_delirium]

Part is also what counts as spam. Google doesn't count a lot of index-type pages as spam, so if you search for a conjunction of a few programming terms, [scala foo bar baz], you often get a page that indexes blogs on a topic, in this case Scala. The post titles on that page will use all of your search terms, but often in different post titles, effectively erasing the conjunction operator in your query.