As far as I can tell Google is basically giving up on the search business. About a month ago I reported a couple spam sites that were in the top ten results for a fairly popular search phrase. Over a month later they're still there. These are sites that are literally just a list of keywords with no actual content of value on the site, and Google does nothing even though they come up at the top of the results for a phrase that gets several hundred searches per day. That has to be in the top .1% of all searches, and while I realize they probably get tens of thousands of complaints per day this one would have literally taken less than 20 seconds to recognize it was a scam site and delete it from the index. And since clearly any algorithm should have moved this to the front of the queue based on both the popularity of the term and also the good standing of my account, the only real conclusion is that Google has basically just given up on trying completely.