There is an old saying that sometimes a company or entity is so big that its left hand doesn’t even know what the right hand is doing…
Google Places a spam farm? Nah.
Evidently the Googleplex has a couple of extra appendages since they classified their own places results as spam according to an article on TechCrunch.
Personally, I think they are just blowing it out of proportion, but when a company gets the size and power of Google, there are always power struggles. Matt Cutts seems like he is pretty straight forward – don’t know him, but his blog and videos are generally blunt and honest.
Either way, if you run a content farm you will get punished and this was just a side effect of the spammer purge that is going on with useless content.
I like Matt’s style so it will be interesting to see how that all plays out… I like the fact that they keep each other honest and maybe you should have competing priorities within a search company/advertising company to keep it real…