We do look at a lot of these spam reports manually, but it's also true that we use the spam reports to prioritize how to spend our engineering resources.

Also keep in mind that reports filed through your Webmaster Tools account are generally treated with more care than anonymous reports. There's more information about how the reports are handled in our blog post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/update-on-spam-reporting.html as well as in the webmaster help groups at http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/79d8b14f4e9aaba2/ .

Take them seriously? [expletives deleted]. Are you kidding? How hard would it be to just darn delete all the keyword spam sites such as allwordsearch.info from results? Or to have a "report search spam" as a link beside every result instead of the joke of webform?

Simple searches such as "VAIO FS850 hotkeys drivers" are absolutely corrupted by this crap, while bats its eyes innocently... because Google has absolutely no incentive to PO advertizers by turning itself back into a legitimate search engine (instead of a glorified marketing ploy).

Ken got a hole in one there. Google's ideals of doing "good" while making profit are out the window now they are big enough that it doesn't matter.

I filed a spam claim through my Webmaster account last week. This morning I checked to see if Google did anything about it. The site is removed from Google. So sometimes it does work. This site is not my immediate competitor though. I'm sure if it was Google would just think I was trying to knock my competitors out of the water.