Seeing as you operate a search engine, what's your take on this whole thing? Do you feel this all truly lies in a gray area, or that there is a clear-cut way things ought to be in this situation?
As an aside, your comment about blocking sites manually for your users just crystallized the value of DuckDuckGo (and by extension other smaller search engines) to me. There is definite value in a search engine that has some opinions about what kind of results are considered quality results. There's probably a name for this; but "curated search engine" or "opinionated search engine" don't seem right.
It's kind of like the difference between a micro-brew and Google's Budweiser.
It's all about perceived user quality. Google has guidelines, but if you read closely they qualify them with we can do whatever we want. They keep making the call that keeping Mahalo in is better for whatever reason, perhaps because they think it will bad PR (censorship?), or they'll get a lot of complaints (where is mahalo.com?) or maybe just because they don't see data that it is bad for users now (site metrics).
I think what angers people legitimately is two fold. First, Mahalo seems to be doing stuff that gets other people banned. Second, they're seemingly being really sketchy about it.
Personally, I think they are on the whole useless pages and am happy to block them. There are certainly a subset of useful pages, and I'd consider doing a tighter integration where I could promote just those pages in our Zero-click Info boxes. Same goes for something like Yahoo! Answers. Most of their pages are useless, but they have a subset that are really useful.
To your latter point, I couldn't agree more. I'm much more aggressive at de-listing what I deem to be "useless" sites. Google can't do this because they'd get too much flack for it, e.g. censorship.
