Power users are the ones who know how things work; they are difficult to manipulate and mislead, will use their knowledge to consume content in the way they want (blocking ads, stripping DRM, rooting devices, etc.), and are in general not docile and "obedient".
In summary: power users know how to control their destiny, and this is something companies like Google are opposed to, because those companies want to be the ones in control.
Why is everyone so actively opposed to power users? I blame tbe field of UX that
- instead of working to improve products so that ordinary people can achieve more
- always decides to work on dumbing down the products so "everyone" can use them.
World of Warcraft became more and more accessible over time, and eventually reached a point where it was so accessible that no one wanted to play it since it wasn't fun and there was nothing to achieve.
Diablo 3 was meant to appeal to the mass market but it was really obvious to everyone that the game was horrible since it wasn't actually meant for anyone in particular. They literally had design choices that were obvious to teenagers that it was a profit-making machine.
I haven't really been a video gamer in years but AFAIK they don't have the same reputation and are just an ordinary company now due to changing their model from "amazing product" to "mass market product".
* Power users are far fewer than ordinary people. * Power users are hard to manipulate, and hard to satisfy.
That, of course, also tends to take care of spammers, malware as you described and just plain buggy bots. Those can be tackled with additional measures, but first and foremost Google cares about search latency. (And quality: higher latency reduces quality, too.)
Ridiculous. I'd rather wait longer for better results.
Even in the real world there is a correspondingly analogous saying: "Think carefully before you open your mouth."
I think Google have just stopped even trying to maintain their "flagship" Search service - that the only way I could explain how their search quality and website responsiveness could decline to the level of the old Yahoo.com and Altavista. And don't get me started about the sorry state of their Google Groups archive...
While more variety in search engines would be great, they'd still be choke points.
What's really needed is a decentralized search engine.