superclown2 - 9:00 am on Mar 2, 2013 (gmt 0)

At least here in the UK, in the SERPs I measure, Google has increasingly, over the last few months, featured new sites backed with thousands of Xrumer or injected links in high positions. These have been increasing in number after each update. So, to answer your question, Google is at fault for a lot of extremely poor results lately, but hopefully not for ever - I wouldn't have thought that filtering this junk would be rocket science.