Content Aggregation = increasing spam

This morning I was trying to look for a piece of news and I did what most of us would have done.. "googled" for it...

And google did what it does the best.. got me all the links for the sites with that piece of news.. I checked the first link.. read the first article.. then clicked on the second on in the google list.. hoping to get some more information or a different point of view or someone else reporting about it, and guess what, it was the same news article from the first site which was captured and displayed by the second site in the list..

Alright no issues... lets try the next one..

Oh this is nice.. this one is different.. i read that one.. but i wanted to read more..
so tried some more links..

but sadly even after checking upto 5th page.. all i could find was the same two articles.. repeatedly appearing with different fonts or backgrounds on different sites.. which of course had "Aggregated" the content from the source site..

Such a wonderful use of technology..

I agree that its a great concept to get all your favorite content from different locations to one place.. but like every good thing.. this one is starting to get misused..

There are a lot of sites these days who are just replicating information from other sites.. without posting anything original.. and its actually gets annoying if you are looking for some information and keep bumping into same stuff again and again..

And i guess we cant really do anything about this except for just ignoring these sites (that is if you have already looked around a bit and know which ones are just replicating), which anyway keep growing..

I wish there was a way the search engines could identify which site is the actual source and which ones are just aggregating.. and put the page ranks accordingly..

any thoughts about it.. ??