I have heard that many top spots are now being occupied by large corporate entities, etc. I've heard complaints of spam and made for adsense scraper
sites dominating results.

I hear this, but haven't seen it. When I surf for general fun or info, the results I see are good. For my niche, a fairly competitive retail sector, I would not have noticed that there was an update except for the "noise" across the various forums starting from 9/22 and getting increaingly louder.

Traffic for my site is up, rankings are as good or better than they've ever been. In fact, for one new item I've added in the last week, I see page 1 results for a specific term with 22 million results. I nod to the gods here... I know that luck may have something to do with this.

Scrapers and spammers have never been a significant issue in my niche, at least for page one results. A little different for Yahoo and MSN, which let some of these sites in.

For those of you who have been hit hard by this update, take heart from this post on Matt Cutts blog, dated 10/19/05:

"Finally, GoogleGuy posted yesterday or so that a new binary is also wending its way from data centers like 66.102.7.x. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a second stage of the index rolls out around this time next week. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a third stage of the index rolls out the week after that. I just wanted to let people know that there’s still flux to come."

So, it appears that it is much too early to draw conclusions or throw stones.

For the record, WMW did not go down because they moved. Their host had a major hardware failure affecting many websites, not just WMW. After two days of promises with no results, WMW decided to move, resulting in the extended downtime. Just imagine what you would do if your site was down for more than 2 days... Well, maybe it's not so hard to imagine for some of you with Jager still playing.

It's going to be a couple of weeks at least before the dust settle on this. Until then hang tight, listen, watch and make your plans.