Well, at least according to Matt Cutts, principle engineer at Google. In this weekend's blog post on the official Google blog, Matt says:

Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago.....As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words
He also mentions these points:
* Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;
* Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and
* Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.
(perhaps as a result of anti-trust cases currently going on????)

What do you think? Is Google better than ever? Or do you prefer to use another search engine for your regular searches?