At some point they switched to a slightly different model where you would see the normal obfuscated answers with a request to log in at the top of the page, but if you scrolled down far enough, the answers would be there in clear text.
They were certainly walking a very fine line, but Google seemed to give them a pass with this system for quite some time.
Google really tried to unlearn this a couple of years ago.
Back when any question you would ask would have at least 20000 answers it seemed only the pages never contained the text, they only where in the index because of some link with that text.
Google used to have a forum tab for search results with only user generated content among discussions and forums! Damn, I still remember how sad and frustrated I was on the day they removed it with no explanation.
My recollection is that during the Google+ period, Google changed their indexing and basically destroyed every other forum. Things that were first page results dropped out completely and lost virtually all of their ad revenue.
You used to be able to google a simple question, something that could be answered on the search page without having to click through. But since no one clicked on them, they stopped appearing after a few years. The only results were ones where the data was hidden and you had to click through.
The search suggestions are still there, so the various memes around "why do ..." still work. The part that's been removed is that Google Instant used to start showing you the results page as you typed, before hitting enter.
Every couple of years they seem to wipe out all these kinds of things, so you don't get them, then companies come up with new ways of writing their pages so that they all show up again.
Remember when we had all those spammy answer sites that dominated Google searches for almost any technical question?
As a user, I'm glad they are hiding keywords. First of all it is private data, and secondly websites where doing all kinds of annoying stuff with the information (eg. they added a list of search terms used to find the page on the bottom of the page, presumably to further increase Google rank for these terms).
But I really miss the time when I saw the keywords that people used to find my page. Lots of insight that is now lost.
This was a marketing feature more than anything else so google could boast about how fast their search engine was. However, it always had tons of usability problems for no added benefit to the user, especially when refining a previous search, or trying to retype some funky word you found in the results.
This meant you could keep scrolling and what do you see - a few pages after the blurred out answers were the real answers!
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