They automated everything in order to not have to invest in human labor, in order to profit most greatly from scale while paying the fewest people they can get

They automated everything in order to not have to invest in human labor, in order to profit most greatly from scale while paying the fewest people they can get away with. Their original index was just an algorithm that distilled human labor from webrings and indexes, that supposedly was great on its own (hint: nope, they crawled the entire Internet, and yet they still remain critically dependent on blogs and news sites for the volunteer labor their algorithm depends on).