You get what you pay for. Google 'pays' for links; that's what they get. Lots of links. Substituting an algorithm for human judgment in determining a page's value works until its used long enough to affect and skew people's behavior. Competition in the search and ranking field is desperately needed in the short run, and AI that can directly recognize what we actually want to measure: content value, in the long run. When an AI can only be fooled by spam pages so good that humans like the pages, too, we're there.