You must somehow have avoided running into it, but .co.cc was a fever swamp and a nightmare. For any popular search terms you can think of, it contained "popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "my-popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "best-popular-search-terms.co.cc" and so on ad freaking nauseam. And it got spammed all over your screen, because Google likes to find search terms in the domain name.
What do you think was there? Do you think 11 million people woke up one day and decided ".co.cc would be a great domain for my business"?
They should have nuked it from orbit a long time ago.
EDIT: I just realized .co.cc is not actually down, but it's blocked by my provider now and no longer indexed by Google, so it's pretty much gone for me. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
It's an ugly cheap kludge. Furthermore it is a kludge which raises a question about how good Google's new singing dancing search results filtering algorithm really is, if it can't separate the wheat from the chaff at /co.cc/.
<Google directed cynicism>The cynic in me sees the timing of this as the first salvo in an effort toward the monetization of the coming proliferation of new commoditized top-level domains. When search results are nothing more than an advertising platform, why should a search engine return your results unless you are paying for the screen space? Perhaps, /co.cc/ was not encouraging the use of Google Analytics or promoting Adwords sufficiently.</Google directed cynicism>
You're confusing cynicism with paranoia. A cynic would think that Google has lost faith in its algorithm and is taking to manually blocking spammy sites; a paranoid would think that Google plans to have websites pay to be included in search, and is retaliating against hosts that don't use Google Analytics or Adwords.
Not really having a dog in the hunt for Google page ranks, it's not really paranoia for me. It's not really cynicism either given that it is a natural extension of Google's basic revenue model, i.e. showing links to pages in exchange for payment. I just added the tag to keep the post consistent with implicit HN style guidelines.
There is nothing sacred about the blue text links, and with "personalization" they don't reflect an objective page ranking, but a subjective ranking based on speculation about what one is most likely to click.
It is only in the minds of consumers of Google's search services that a wall between search results and advertising exists. With personalization, the same algorithms are applied to both.
First, is that really "a significant fraction?"
Second, when did collective punishment become less evil than innocent until proven guilty?