BTW, it also helped that people really found Rap Genius useful.
Er, what? You suggesting that Google execs are benchmarking the productivity of google searches? There are a million other "substitutes"...hence the shady SEO...
Er, what? You suggesting that Google execs are benchmarking the productivity of google searches? There are a million other "substitutes"...hence the shady SEO...
People tend to think in binary: A site is either spam or no spam. But spam is much more complex. A site can be 90% good and 10% bad. A site can turn spammy without their intention: comment spam, hacked sites. A site can pull out all the stops to hide their link buying. A site can be useful to have in index, regardless of some spammy behavior.
Avoiding the (questionable) debate on the productive capacity of planet-earth...the "model" of what customers' "really need" is questionable. Do they need (1) information that is factually correct?; and/or (2) do they need the actually meaning or interpretation of (1). And if its true a subset need (2) what is the ratio of (2/1)?
And only then does this framework make sense.