Yes, starting in 2004 with census.gov data. Then friends repro'd it in 2005-2006. Repro'd again in 2008. About to repro again in 2011. Current site launched 4 months ago on new domain that had never been registered before. Now passing 1000 uniques per day with 300,000 pages indexed and 3 million to go - and expect to easily hit the short-term traffic target in 2 to 3 months.
The site is non-spam, genuinely useful and solves a real problem. The current (soon to be previous) top ranking site for the category is awful. It's filled with ads to make it unusable and functionality sucks. It was acquired a long time ago, the core dev team has probably left and the entire category needs a refresh and I'm happy to help.
I should have added to the blog entry to look for categories where the competition is stale and has been acquired by a large publisher looking to cut costs and aggressively monetize.
