The company's business model had nothing to do with domain squatting. It is enough to have a single domain to do huge amounts arbitrage. Or should I say "it was enough". :)
By the way, there still is a number of smaller companies doing Google->Yahoo arbitrage with Yahoo's quiet approval.
They could start arbitraging into second tier networks, like FindWhat or LookSmart. But it's unlikely that this will actually work in practice. The bids in those networks are too low.
Another way of doing it (and that's how some arbitragers are structuring it even now) is to have two or more separate companies, with different billing addresses and access respective Google accounts using different IPs.
AFAIK Google trends normalizes to total search volume. Therefore, it probably means that more and more people who use Google don't care about programming languages.
If you like Core Wars you might also be interested in Tierra, which was one of the first large scale experiment in artificial evolution. http://life.ou.edu/tierra/
Next time they will not link directly to you but redirect through something. Or simply copy-and-paste your content into the job description. It's a waste of time trying to fight this...
It might have been more effective to redirect them to a randomly chosen product description from a set of, say, fifty. They'd likely have wasted a lot of Turk time rewording those fifty descriptions before realizing what was going on.
By the way, there still is a number of smaller companies doing Google->Yahoo arbitrage with Yahoo's quiet approval.