tedster - 8:54 pm on Apr 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

Google says it is attempting to detect and downrank "low quality" pages/sites. They've said nothing about below-average or high quality.

I think they did. Here's a quote from the article that started this thread:

...the key is, you also have your experience of the sorts of sites that are going to be adding value for users versus not adding value for users. And we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons