[jsnell]

Hey,

I'm sure that using these sites was the thing for your research for all kinds of practical reasons, and you don't need to justify that :) My actual complaint was about the misleading title, which you did not address.

Note that the clickbait title actually hijacked your research; there's like three comments out of 240 here that are about your paper. So while it probably feels good to have received all this attention, it's just bogus engagement. I guess it's pretty meta for a paper about search result spam to do blackhat social media engagement optimization though.

[phoerious]

I wouldn't say it's misleading or wrong. It's certainly a bit catchy, but it also aligns with a greater discussion that's going on at the moment. Regardless of the title, most people probably wouldn't or couldn't discuss scientific literature in-depth anyway, but search engine spam is something many can relate to, be it from Google or otherwise. It's certainly a topic we will be hearing about a lot more in the future. Besides, we didn't even anticipate this to be picked up by non-scientific journals that quickly, though the title may have helped. ;-)