Around ‘08 or ‘09 they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and decided webspam could rank highly as long as it didn’t get too nasty. The whole web (as far as searches results will tell you) promptly turned into webspam. I imagine this, along with their plainly-evil inlining of ads with search results within a couple years of that, made their profit arrow go up-and-to-the-right so hard that no-one who opposed those moves was paid any mind.