Google has progressed a lot over the years and is likely to in the future. My question to you however is: in the future what will be important to ranking well in Google, pagerank or quality unique content? As it seems today a site with copied/poorly written content can rank well over one in which has relevant and unique content that is well written. Mainly because they have a higher pagerank (from buying links possibly). Personally I hope that in the future Google (and other search engines) actually start to notice the quality unique content and rank well accordingly. Just my thoughts, does anyone else have any opinions?
It is very hard to judge content quality with any kind of automated algorithm. As such the search engines will likely keep relying on backlinks to determine rankings for a while. About their only other option is a social bookmarking type model which would be much too vulnerable to spam/exploitation.
I do agree wiht vansterdam. If you can offer the content that the people really need, they will never go away.
The matter of content is nothing new and since its launch, Google has constantly been surfing the web and scanning the useful content pages offered on the websites and this trend will continue in the future as well.
When google started, they used back links as main measure of site quality. Now with google bar, google analytics, and adsense, google gets much more information about visitors: how often a page has been visited, who visited it, how they get to it,… However, some search results are still of poor quality.