Robert_Charlton - 6:07 pm on Sep 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

...reviews of restaurants...

My point about reviews of restaurants is that Google appears to be paying for them, as they're material that's behind a log-in (we're not just talking about robots.txt), if they're even that accessible. The Zagat material may be from user reviews that never get published in their entirety... I'm not sure, as I'm not currently a subscriber. But user-generated content may be subject to other uses.

Similarly, Google may well be paying Answers.com for the use of its content, and Answers.com may be paying those dictionaries for their content.

I think this is completely separate from the algo. Whatever the usage considerations, the Google Local content shouldn't create dupe problems for anyone, and I'm guessing that Answers.com pages out in the wild are subject to the vicissitudes of Google's normal dupe filtering, just like any other pages.

Those "definition" links are clearly subject to a lot of redirects and aren't likely to be transmitting PageRank (which would be a problem for Answers.com if they were, since they go to a page with a different tracking string than the corresponding Answers.com page on the site).