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Winning the fight against spam will cause Google short-term pain — but save it from the risk of alienating users in the long term.

Despite its success — or rather, because of it — Google has a growing battle on its hands, one that threatens to not only jeopardize its core search business, but also the advertising that flows from it. The battle pits the web giant and its legions of programmers against search-engine spam artists and content "farms" that regularly game the company's algorithms. With competition from the likes of Facebook, Microsoft and a legion of smaller startups on the rise, cleaning the spam content from its results might be the best place for Google to devote its energies.