Google search and search engine spam

Curious though what the metrics they use to evaluate effectiveness against spam are. It could have just as much (or as little) spam indexed as it had 5 years ago, and in some comparisons that would be valid, but what if much of the spam had moved from being evenly distributed throughout results to being distributed in the top positions? Then, one could say spam was even lower than ever in total quantity, but it would be even worse in terms of user experience.

That said, I agree with Google, users' expectations have skyrocketed, and it is tough to keep pace with them.

Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!"

Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.

Since google wants to do everything with algorithms rather than hard coding (some of) the offenders, the minute they give you specifics the "fix" will be circumvented in some way.

I'd be interested in a further explanation of "Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines [...]".

Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught? Does this entail decreasing the rank of the entire domain, the IP? Does blacklisting ever happen?

I ask since Google have previously[1] said they don't wish to manually interfere with search results.

[1] "The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm" - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-googl...

According to our metrics we are great; pity-about-you, unless you can "Please tell us how we can do a better job."

I expected more. It reads like content farm.