The harvard link touches on how he was using cheap Google Ads for this purpose. It reminds me of a shady "internet background check" company that I had the unfortunate pleasure of working with a few years ago. They were approaching, if not exceeding, this site in total shady tactics. One thing they did that their former-pill-pushing founders came up with which I did think was rather clever is they were able to buy Ad Words for cheap for various permutations of common given names and they used this to bootstrap their business to great effect.