Sascha Noyes wrote:
Example for knock-offs scoring higher than wikipedia: Search for 'Napoleonic code' (http://www.google.com/search?q=Napoleonic+code&sourceid=mozilla-search&a...) where both sciencedaily.com (IIRC a rather new mirror) and nationmaster.com rank higher than wikipedia. This could not be explained with the google pagerank algorithm, because wikipedia surely gets a lot more quality and quantity links than others do - But it would make sense if the wikipedia ranking essentially gets divided by two.
Sciencedaily.com seems to get referenced a lot by the scientific and education communities - I got the impression that the couple running it have a lot of friends and contacts in those communities, but that might just be a side-effect of being journalists.
New WP slogan idea: "why look at a mirror when you can bask in the sun of the real Wikipedia?"
(Yeah yeah, sunburned by vandalism then incinerated in the nuclear furnace of an edit war... :-) )
Stan