Comment by mtlynch

It seems like you're being sarcastic, but I think that's really what happened. I think it's much more about getting press for doing something funny than it is about having a meaningful impact on cluttering search results.

It's the same reason why Google paid its marketing team to make a promo for Gmail Blue (back in 2013 when Google was still doing legitimately funny fake promos):

https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/intl/en/promos/blue/