I completely agree with you. Outside of doing software/programming relating searches, Google's results are all overridden with, and you phrased it perfectly, cheap content sites. Most of the time, if I'm doing a search like "best turkey call", I tend to do a search such as "jesse hunting forums best turkey call". I would not call eHow, Yahoo Answers and other cheap content sites SPAM, but they are far from reliable than places where you can get extremely relevant information such as hunting forums regarding hunting, or health and workout information from forum.bodybuilding.com.
Yeah, that is about how I operate. But, when I am out of my comfort zone (like lawn mower repair), I am completely lost. It seems like search engines should know where people get the best results and serve those up first. And, in my opinion, it is rare that the best results come from these content sites. Heck, when I search that same query today, out of the first five results, only 1 has a picture of a lawnmower that is not in an ad. And, it is a stock photo.
