Though search engines are fixated on meeting their users’ needs (they should be anyway), too little control is given to the user in determining their own fate. There should be many more tools for users allowing them to help give the engines data to fine tune their algorithms. For example, it should be a one click operation for me to tell the engine that the result I got was a spam result due to the fine SEO efforts of some agency, with little or nothing to do with what I was looking for. There should be an easy way for users to enter meta data about results that please or offend them for the benefits of later users. Let users comment on results, and let the community of users moderate those comments like one of the many great forums out there (slashdot, etc.). While initially giving users more power might lead to more spamming, over the long run, it might be the most effective anti-spam filter out there.
Yahoo’s efforts in this area are interesting. I will have more comments on what Yahoo is doing in this sphere later this week.