Google definitely caused a lot of collateral damage with Panda, especially to large sites with user generated content. And unlike algorithms that target aggressive use of links or ads, it's still very unclear how to fix a site that's been hit by Panda (I should know, my car review site was hit by Panda, and never really recovered, despite 2 years of improvement work).
Now that content farms are not such a pressing problem, Google should be able to dial things back a bit, so that good sites like Metafilter aren't ranked lower than they otherwise would be.
In my experience, the animal updates and other recent changes definitely favour the big brands. My main car reviews site (established 1997) was hammered by Panda, and has never recovered, while the big brands I competed with have been left untouched, despite having content that is often lower quality.
While I think Google has done a really poor job of helping smaller sites who've been unfairly hit by these changes, I don't think there is anything underhand going on. I just think Google decided to tune their algorithms to minimise the number of bad results they show.
They appear to be happy with results that favour big brands that they trust, while excluding most of the worst content farms, even though the cost of that is potentially failing to deliver high quality results from smaller sites. I'm sure they have user satisfaction statistics that justify this trade-off they're making. No malevolence or greed is required from Google in this scenario.
In the short term, this is probably good for Google's users, but in the long term, it's creating a two tier web, where new entrants will find it more difficult than they should to compete with established brands.
p.s. There seems to be a similar tradeoff made in terms of newer pages being favoured over older, more relevant pages. It makes sense in some cases (news for example), but in my view, the newness signal is too strong at the moment, and it's hurting the quality of their search results.
My main site was part of the collateral damage from Panda, so I'm pleased to hear Matt say that they're still tweaking Panda to help sites that are still being affected.
My site is pretty much all user generated content (car reviews), and Panda seems to struggle with differentiating such sites from content farms, unless they're part of a larger, established brand.
Almost two years of attempting to fix the problem by improving quality and layouts, reducing ads etc had no effect. Then I raised my case on Google's own forums, resulting in a lot of attention, and a few weeks later I saw a massive improvement (I know, correlation is not causation). Unfortunately I seem to have been hit again last week, by something that looks suspiciously like Panda (though I'm not 100% sure).
I've mostly moved on (now working on an iOS app), but it did appear from the outside that Google was comfortable with the impact of Panda, and it's good to know that they're still focussed on improving it.
You can't imagine that Samsung will be thrilled about the Nexus 4. The Galaxy S3 suddenly looks poor value, and that's their flagship device. It was selling in big numbers, and although it's cheaper than the iPhone 5, presumably it's still a very profitable device.
If Google are determined to sell high quality devices at cost to gain market share, and can make the general public aware of this (non-trivial), Apple may find itself as the sole company making big profits from actually selling phone hardware.
That said, only Samsung with their Galaxy brand have come anywhere near the marketing impact of the iPhone, so if Google really want to make an impression, they're going to need market these devices at a level that they've never managed before.
Some high quality user generated content sites seem to have been impacted by this change too. My main site (see my about for details) has lots great car reviews, which are unique to the site, yet my Google US traffic has fallen off a cliff.
If my site is a content farm, then surely so are sites like Stack Overflow and Trip Advisor, as I'm using the same model of moderated and curated user generated content, and while I don't think my site is quite as useful as Stack Overflow (what is?), I've been running this site as a labour of love since 1997, and I've had countless emails from people who've found the site useful, so I must be doing something right.
Google definitely caused a lot of collateral damage with Panda, especially to large sites with user generated content. And unlike algorithms that target aggressive use of links or ads, it's still very unclear how to fix a site that's been hit by Panda (I should know, my car review site was hit by Panda, and never really recovered, despite 2 years of improvement work).
Now that content farms are not such a pressing problem, Google should be able to dial things back a bit, so that good sites like Metafilter aren't ranked lower than they otherwise would be.