I just read an article on CNN discussing, once again, the problems with spam appearing in Google search results. Of course once again the topic of using human editors to rate sites has been brought up.
According to the article the issue is created by marketers and SEO companies. They claim that the results delivered for “money” keywords are nothing but spam and that it is due to the proliferation of easy to generate content tools.
Of course the solution the author presents is to manually review sites. There are over a Billion pages on the internet so good luck with that!
Anyway, here is the link to the article. http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/01/13/people.power.cashmore/index.html