[lumost]

Look at python documentation. There is a metric ton of spam sites that copy and paste python documentation with ads inserted. Google ranks these higher than the primary source.

I suspect google is boosting ad supported content over non ad supported content. Directly incentivizing paraphrased/copy pasta content.

[thevagrant]

I see this with questions and answers from reddit or other forums which get syndicated into various other 'developer' sites and get high rankings on Google.

Search engines should let us configure a whitelist of sites for certain categories/context of search.

[Wyoming23]

Which can be so frustrating when a bad answer gets propagated this way.

I've had times where the same "bad" information (whether completely wrong, incomplete, misleading, not best-practice, confusing, whatever manner of "bad") showed up on multiple different sites all on the first page of Google, often clearly copied from one another or the same original quora/stackoverflow/whatever.

[PenguinCoder]

I'm pretty sure that Google search page rank, ranks sites with Google ads HIGHER than the same site without any ads. Of course they would, it gives them better metrics to show their Google ads are effective and they can charge more.

[solarkraft]

I think it's plausible that there are types of spam Google can't fight against, but this ought to be possible (which supports the "malice" theory).