tedster - 10:00 pm on Aug 20, 2010 (gmt 0)

To go back to the exact title question for a minute - why would Google give exact match domains so much weight? Putting myself in the shoes of an IR engineer, I'd say that an exact match domain would clearly be a strong relevance signal, right? Who would use an exact match domain to serve content on a completely other topic?

So with just a few other relevance signals for support, you've got a VERY high "relevance meta tag" within Google's architecture. Throw in some query-independent signals, and it's just a natural.