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Sounds very challenging, yet also very black-hattish on a massive scale not that I have much love for Google.

That is the problem that many of the most interesting projects have some moral ambiguities(military, financial, etc, etc).

While one is getting paid, it is very easy to justify or not even think about where the money comes from(que Sinclair quote).

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Not quite black-hat; I consider tiered link building to be more blackhat.

Scraping the search results was about getting data on where items were positioned in the index, not pumping spam into the search results. Although to be clear, I did help do stuff like that for a while too but it never felt good and we vastly preferred the rank tracking product to link building services.

Also, Google's getting extremely good at combating search spam.

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