Standards at the speed of thought

I've had to deal with comment spam in the ObjectSharp blogs over the past few days.  Through a search of Google, found a simple, trigger-based solution for .Text (the engine that we use) that I suspect will deal with the majority of the spam that was coming through.  But, as explained in this post, Google is modifying their ranking engine to pay attention to a newly created attribute on the anchor tag that will basically mitigate the benefit of comment spam, that being to artificially raise the Google rank for the offending links.  What impressed me is the speed with which this innovation was implemented, not only by Google but by the list of blog hosts and competitive search engines at MSN and Yahoo.  Whoa. Would that other standards could work that way.