Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On 24 May 2007 at 22:41:34 -0700, William Pietri
Honestly, out of the things that come up in the
first page of results,
I'd generally rather they ended up on the Wikipedia article if they were
going to read something uncritically. (Of similar quality were
government sites, although they were often less readable.) We're not
perfect, of course. But neither are we trying to separate people from
their money.
I tried searching on "Viagra", one of the most heavily-spammed
keywords on the Internet, and found that the second site in the
Google search results (not counting the paid results in a box above)
is the Wikipedia article on Viagra (which redirects to its generic
name, Sildenafil). (The first search result is the official
manufacturer's site on the drug.) That's pretty good of Wikipedia to
get ahead of all the spammers with their SEO voodoo, and pretty good
of Google to manage to get the relevant and informative sites at the
top.