What Google really needs is a willingness to accept a way higher threshold of false negatives in weeding out content. I'd love to have a "known good" version of Google that risked leaving out some content. Let's start by banning all .info domains along with any that include a hyphen.
Come on, it's in the NYTimes & by Paul Krugman (an economist) - not bad for that combination. After reading lots of articles by technologists, you need to remember to temper your expectations when you visit the website of a mainstream publication.
That said, his theory isn't entirely false - Google may actually need some "outside" ideas to mix in with their own. Then again, perhaps (my instinct says probably) they've been doing that for years, and the spammers are just evolving faster.