any hard evidence of this supposed declined, or - indeed - what "poor results" mean. And is it just possible not that Google has decided to let more crap in (which just seems patently absurd to me), but rather that spammers have gotten smarter? That their bots, their algorithms, even their dedicated "white hat" SEO efforts have met with increasing success? Even when Google adjusts their algorithms to fight spam, unless those efforts are wholly successful, and without any collateral damage, these adjustments are disparaged as promoting, rather than fighting spam. The Florida update that "stopped showing many perfectly good websites" also stopped showing a much greater number of perfectly crappy and useless websites. That Google is deliberately making their results worse to send users to AdSense-rich sites, again, dismisses the role of these sites in trying to attract these queries in the first place, often with substantial investment in not only SEO techniques but new technologies (such as Demand Media's algorithmic approach to optimization). Finally, I would point out that Google continues to be a leader in semantic web technologies that increasingly make it unnecessary for users to visit webpages, or at least be able to make a base assessment of what those pages are about directly in the SERPs (basically the drive behind rich snippets). I find it amusing that many of the same SEOs that were agast at Google's acquisition of MetaWeb - because this further enabled display of answers directly in search snippets without site visits