A big dollop of lazy journo-bluster has landed at The Guardian, over the amount of outright spam that’s been inveigling itself into the Google search-results.

This growing so-called backlash is largely down to some users thinking they can still type in dishwasher review and get good results. Those “two keywords is enough” days are over — just spend 50 minutes learning how to search properly, guys. Yet some people are going to find learning this more difficult than others — more and more people who not fully literate are now trying to use the web. They can’t skim-read the results very well, or remember how to do complex strings of search modifiers. The ‘advanced search’ forms scare them. All the more reason why we need to be teaching search literacy from infant school onward.

Perhaps the Googleplexers who do nothing else but weed for spam are being temporarily overwhelmed? There’s an obvious tidal wave of robot-registered domains being populated by robots with robot-made pages. 99% of this Web spam has never seen a human hand, other than in the plagiarised material that gets pirated, semi-garbled, and pasted into the page. So, hire as many people as it takes to rip out the spam. It’s not as though Google doesn’t have the cash to throw another 500 eyeballs at the problem.

The other problem that people seem to be raising in the Guardian comments is that we don’t really have a reliable hand-made search-engine for product reviews, one that is devoted to serving only reliable reviews from reliable sources — and nothing else. Certainly, I’ve never found one I like and feel I can trust, and which is comprehensive in its sources and relevant to the UK.