Around 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office area, so it couldn't be me, asked if they checked it. While they were quickly apologizing, I asked what site they accessed.

www.excite.com

The look on their faces when I suggested they actually verify the site before firing whoever it was.....

You used to be able to discretely order high quality low cost ink writing implements from a piece of land surrounded by water at "PenIsland".

Edit: I'm glad to see they're still up and working hard to service customers at: http://www.penisland.net (totally safe for work, trust me)

I mean, if I was going to have that kind of surgery I'd definitely be looking for an expert. You put a regular cosmetic surgeon in there and you risk having no wrinkles on things that should have wrinkles and other such catastrophes. All this to say maybe they missed an opportunity when they ditched that domain. ;)

Look at how long pinterest results have ranked highly in image search, even though they're completely useless. I just don't think Google cares to remove them, since surely they have known that pinterest should be excluded from image search results.

Google has some strange preferences. Forbes still dominates SERPs despite one of the worst user-experiences of any mainstream site. It's downright unusable without ad block

IRL social networks. The guy who wrote the Quora algos probably has friends that work at Google who can influence the pagerank. I've seen these kinds of interactions first hand at various events in Seattle-Bellevue around 2014-2016. Only recently has it died down (mainly because the meetup groups either fizzled out or stopped offering free beer).

Only if you come from Google.