[wood_spirit]

My memory is there were a spate of SO scraping sites that google would surface above SO and google just would not zap.

It would have been super trivial to fix but google didn’t.

My pet theory was that google were getting doubleclick revenue from the scrapers so had incentives to let them scrape and to promote them in search results.

[xp84]

I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of them!

Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.

[20after4]

I'm actually surprised it was only ~$20 a month.