If anything G is the most active out of al the engines in combatting the spammers, but it will always be an ongoing battle
After all Gambling/Viagra etc../Porn are one of the most competitive industrys to be promoting for
Search for casino on Yahoo and check the backlinks of the first 20 sites, most sites are just blog spammers who have 40,000 + backlinks
MSN results have improved recently but in a tiny way.
Since G has done it data refresh on 27 Jun and July, everything has gone mad, with now in some cases like KW “casino poker” the top 10 is mainly spammers.
This seems to happen every months and part of me would like to think that instead of G just bumping off spam results, that now there have been changes (they say just a refresh and the current algo has been running for a a year – yeah right! ), they are working out how they got past and how to be quicker at eliminating it
Is it more advantageous for Google to allow this (for Adsense revenue) or is the devaluing of the usefulness of their Search Engine a significant worry for them ???
Adsense has already been devalued through the content network, if you do any other affiliate stuff and want to advertise on G you would need to be insane to advertise on there content network, as you may as well just set fire to your money
For a publicly listed company that spends there life going on about the importance of quality sites, results and user experience there is too much at stake for them to devalue there engine.
In terms of search wars, Microsoft may not win but they are investing over $1 Billion dollars into there search products, things like the new Beta version of IE7 and the Windows Live live.com are huge improvements which will eat at G’s share when ever Windows Vista is finally launched.