callivert - 10:18 am on Aug 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

Goog, always a day late when it comes to keeping up with the real culprits.

Sure, they might not catch a small number of really sophisticated black-hats, but they can still sweep vast numbers of dud blogs off the radar, blogs run by the hordes of second-rate search spammers.
This is a short-term embarrassment for them from a public image point of view. However it's also revealing in a number of ways about how Google works and what its priorities are.