engine - 7:06 pm on Feb 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Quality is in the eye of the beholder. ;)

I monitor the search engines pretty closely for generic and for specialised SERPs.

Over the years there's been a change in the type of low quality information appearing. eg. bad affiliate sites now to bad comparison sites, and bad adsense sites.

Different low quality sites still appear in the SERPs today, compared to yesteryear. So as I see it, things have moved on.

For me, one of the most important mistakes was to mis-understand the impact of the so-called "sandbox" on quality, small sites. However, a quick look at Yahoo, MSN, or Ask usually pulled up the "Google sandboxed site" elsewhere.

If you know what you're looking for, and how to use the advanced search, i've nearly always found it in G's SERPs.

Are they better than yesteryear?
Today, a general look at the SERPs and yes, they are better than they were.

We ought to be asking, how much better can it become?