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

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.