Wired.com: What was the purpose?
Singhal: So we did Caffeine [a major update that improved Googles indexing process] in late 2009. Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.
Matt Cutts: It was like, Whats the bare minimum that I can do thats not spam? It sort of fell between our respective groups. And then we decided, okay, weve got to come together and figure out how to address this.
