I think you shouldn't place too much importance on the "pick a link" phrase, since Greenspan may be exaggerating its significance to win the reader's sympathy.

I think you shouldn't place too much importance on the "pick a link" phrase, since Greenspan may be exaggerating its significance to win the reader's sympathy. The phrase may appear in the evidence against Greenspan not because it is part of a heuristic or a list of internal guidelines but because a Google employee used it in his description of why he thought the site violated the Google TOS. And as far as reasons go, "an employee thinks your site violates the TOS" may be the most that Google can reasonably volunteer. Imagine if your e-mail provider had to reply to each spam message, telling the sender what words triggered the spam filter.