Trouble with Google - losing to spam?

a flurry of recent articles complained about decline of Google search quality. Is Google a monoculture or a Sex-starved Gorilla?

There was a flurry of recent articles pointing to increasing prevalence of spam on Google.

Google Is a Jungle, states Vivek Wadhwa at TechCrunch. Google, Wadhwa contends, has become "a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money."

Google's 'House' Has Cracks In Its 'Algorithmic Search Foundations,' offers Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror. After noticing that websites scraping content from his Stack Overflow forum outranked Stack Overflow in Google search results, and giving up on his Google search for an iPhone 4 case for his wife, Atwood concludes, "This is the first time since 2000 that I can recall Google search quality ever declining"

Google Is Like Bananas, says Felix Salmon at Reuters, expanding on the monoculture idea. He cites a recent New Yorker article explaining how the banana industry is at risk because the same species of banana (the Cavendish) is grown and eaten across the world.

Google Needs Sex, declares Paul Krugman at The New York Times. Krugman takes stock of the Google search debate, only to respond, "This makes me think of sex." Why? Evolutionary theory, he explains, suggests that sexual reproduction is in part a defense against parasites.

Comments:

Gregory Piatetsky
I have not noticed declined in Google result quality for more technical searches, related to analytics and data mining, but perhaps those are less useful for spammers.