Google sits at the center of the spam-blog universe, and with its new search engine, this could get worse. Here's why. Google already runs the biggest free blogging service in the world, Blogger. Since it's free, easy and popular, Blogger unwittingly hosts loads of the spam blogs. Google also operates the largest automatic ad-placement service, AdSense. That provides much of the revenue for spam blogs. And you can bet that the spammers are already gaming their blogs to climb toward the top of Google's new blog search.

The good news: Now that Google is in the middle of the spamosphere, perhaps it will focus its prodigious brainpower into vanquishing the spam bots and their pollution. For now, though, Google's entrée into blog search doesn't change much. I'll be using the engine from time to time, especially its useful tool to find relevant blogs. But even with Google in the mix, blog search is still very much a work in progress.