Now that's funny!
No, I won't be replacing search engines with church bulletin boards anytime soon. But, sooner or later, I think demand for better search results will push things toward my ideal.
Sponsored links don't bother me at all. They are clearly labeled, and pay for the search engine. It's the companies who have spent bazillions gaming the system in order to get their (mostly unwanted) results at the top of Page One that are the problem.
I happen to agree with you. Google used to be better at filtering out that sort of thing... nowadays, not so much. If anything, Penguin and, to a slightly lesser extent, Panda have made things worse, in my opinion. I don't know whether or not this is a scam on Google's part to force more people into their Adwords program, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Penguin particularly annoys me because as with most things Google, they set their robots loose with little human supervision. A lot of good sites have been hurt precisely because they were
so good that a lot of people would link to them, especially in forums, because they had good answers. Penguin picks up on those links and more often than not assumes that they're spam.
So... if you happen to have the world's best information on some topic, and a gazillion people post a link to your answer because it really is that good, and Penguin doesn't consider the sites from which those links originate to be worthy of its anointing, then expect your rankings to nosedive. Why? Basically, because your content was
too good and too many people linked to it.
Of course, you can always register for a Google account, and then for Webmaster Tools, and then upload the code to your site to enable it, and then wait around a while to get a meaningful number of hits so you know who is linking to you, and then visit every one of those sites and try to guess whether or not Google approves of it, and then request that the links be removed (which won't happen, but you can still request it), and then make a list of the links that you think Google won't approve of, and then create a file with those links, and then go through Google's process of disavowing the links.
It's a mess.
However, there are things that always help a site, such as good content presented using the words and phrases people are likely to use when searching for your product; standards compliance; and thoughtful use of tags, headings, subheadings, and emphases. Those things never go out of style.
-Rich
