jomaxx - 7:15 pm on Feb 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

I think the question of whether Google has contributed to "Web crapola" with AdSense is completely separate from what the original poster was asking

It's different but far from separate. For one thing, most of Google's updates seem to revolve around their efforts to keep webmasters from exploiting loopholes in Google's algorithms - mainly manipulating link patterns and vomiting vast amounts of duplicate/scraped content onto the web.

To put it another way, if Google was still using the same basic algorithm from circa 2000, then their results would almost certainly be much much worse than they are.