Is this how Google is ridding Internet of SPAM?

Long gone are the days when you used to search on Google and get all sorts of spammy results returned that made you frustrated after spending hours searching that sent you on tangents. How often do you get blue websites when searching for something truly legit – I’d expect your answer to be ‘never any more’.

Why is this the case, have spammers gone away or has something else happen; what else could have happened – maybe Google’s algorithm has become ever more smart to stamp out spammy and misleading websites? Basically the answer is the latter.

Google’s head of anti-spam team Matt Cutts puts it perfectly in his recent online appearance and to hear it from the horses mouth – he breaks spammer’s spirit – that’s one way of doing it!:

If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on.

Has this worked in your own personal experience, do you generally find what you’re looking for on Google SERP (search engine results pages)?