For folks that are interested, the original blog post about our freshness change is here: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html

Hey everybody, the intent of the blog post wasn't to say "everything is hunky dory." Spam on Google is up compared to a few months ago, which is why I said there had been an uptick in spam. Our overall relevancy is better than in the past, but not the part of relevancy related to spam. The rest of the post was trying to say that we hear the complaints and we're working on improvements. The revamp to our doc-level classifier launched in the last few weeks, and a change related to scraped content was approved this week and will launch soon. We're testing other ideas to improve things too.

Actually, if you're talking about cexx.org, we detected that your main root page was hacked. Because of the hacked content, we removed the site from our index and tried to contact you at abuse at cexx.org. Here, check out this archive.org link and view the source yourself: http://web.archive.org/web/20091027195941/www.cexx.org/main.htm

I tried to say that spam had gone up recently, and tried to talk about what we're planning to do about it.

What do you want when you do the search [advanced]? There's a conference called AdvancED that we show at #1. I see our advanced search help pages at #2, Advanced search from AltaVista at #3, SMX Advanced (a conference I've spoken at before) at #4, and Advanced Auto Parts at #5. That's a pretty darn good set of search results for an ambiguous query like [advanced].

What were some concrete searches that didn't work for you?

Google does have this in Google News, e.g. see http://news.google.com/news/settings?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en if you're logged into a Google Account, but web search doesn't have a way to do this right now.

Empty search results are against our quality guidelines: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/empty-review-sites/ I asked my team to check into this.