steveb - 5:32 am on Jun 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

Example of how screwed up this is... as I mentioned above, an answers.com page appears now at #8 for the one word search I pay most attention to. Answers is mostly a copy of the Wikipedia so it shouldn't rank at all, but unlike the Wikipedia page which shows 9000 backlinks for their page on the topic, the answers.com page shows (on Yahoo) only 200 internal links and 19 external links, ALL of them PR0...!

This is an astonishlingly weak result to be in the top ten for the probable most searched term on the Internet.

But then it gets even WORSE... there is a second answers result, at #22... with nine (count 'em, NINE!, internal links and one 404 external link).

Whatever google is doing with these one word searches, they are specifically giving answers.com an absurd boost. Now they may be doing it because they are deliberately giving a boost to SIMILAR TEXT to what is on the WIKIPEDIA, but whatever the reason, this one word result is illogical and extremely poor.

And now checking the one word search for the parent concept of the above search, the first result is the Wikipedia and the second result the duplicate on answers.com.