In general, it's probably true that the amount (and sophistication) of spam and spammish content has tended to overwhelm whatever technology improvements in search there have been.
It's just that to the HN audience, the spam sure seems unsophisticated. I can imagine being able to filter out most blogspam just by looking at the CSS. like, every blog spam review and restaurant site is so obviously bad it hurts.
also, "bestmitersaw.com" or other similar single product review/spam sites filled with affiliate links. Jeez. Kill them all.
