This is just lip service - Google's quality has dropped off and its really obvious. Recently, I've been regularly comparing the results I get from Google and the ones I get from Bing. Needless to say, Bing's far more relevant. The biggest point people have made are on the money searches like "MP3 Player" but the results I've been comparing have been local searches and programming things like: "show/hide text boxes in Javascript." In Google all I get is links to Amazon and other random results to link farms like javascriptworld.com. In Bing, I get links to forums and tutorials which is what I'm looking for.
Time and time again Google has failed. I've already moved on to Bing and Duckduckgo and I would recommend you do too. Unless you like digging through hordes of useless SERPS.
Consider that possibly the problem isn't Google; perhaps it's you.
For instance, http://www.javascriptworld.com (which I run) is NOT a link farm. Rather, it's there to support the book "JavaScript & Ajax for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, 7th edition" (by Tom Negrino and myself).
Numerous colleges & universities courses use our book as a required textbook. Consequently, many teachers & professors link to it from course websites to let their students know where to download the book's code examples. Yes, that probably helps the site's Google rank, but that was never one of our goals.
As a result, when you search for certain JavaScript examples, you may run across my site. And in your particular case, my site doesn't help because you don't own our book. But just because it doesn't solve your particular problem doesn't mean that the site isn't useful for other people.
I'm not sure why you thought it was a link farm. Perhaps you should have taken a closer look at the site before using it as a bad example?
Time and time again Google has failed. I've already moved on to Bing and Duckduckgo and I would recommend you do too. Unless you like digging through hordes of useless SERPS.