On 24 May 2007 at 22:41:34 -0700, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
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.