Can you give me an example of a search that produces content farm results? I mainly search for technical docs and such so perhaps I’m not seeing it as much because of that.
Why does google have to explicitly block these sites? No doubt all those garbage, ad-strewn recipe sites rank low on user experience metrics. So if there were a better recipe site out there, Google would show it to you. It seems they (recipe sites) are simply having a hard time monetizing without being uber annoying.
They certainly don't. They are a private company and can do whatever they want. But, Google was much better before content farms. You could find unique, original content by actual people. Google could easily fix this by devaluing sites that mass produce content. But they don't and we are left with the mess we have today.