Tech bits: Microsoft 3-D maps; Google favors Wikipedia
Dallas Morning News (subscription), TX - 13 minutes ago
... software tool. If you're looking for something in Google, chances are a link to Wikipedia will show up at the top of your list. The ...

I'm not sure which is worse - the fact that someone felt that a serious research study was required to figure out that this is happening, or the fact that a semi-respectable newspaper felt compelled to report on it, as if it's actually "news."

So what are Yahoo and MSN doing right that Google isn't? What about ask.com?

Well... That depends on who you talk to, I suppose! If you're the charitable sort, you'd say that Google's PageRank algorithm is written to reward sites where the content gets changed a lot, and since Wikipedia's gets changed constantly, that boosts its rankings enormously. But because the Google Toolbar is set up to report click activity, it becomes a sort of feedback loop - people click more on sites that are on Page 1 of Google's results, and when they do, that gets reported to Google, which then ranks the site even higher, and so on.

The uncharitable version is that Google is deliberately ranking Wikipedia higher than other sites, artificially, for various reasons including the fact that Wikipedia provides content to scrapers - who all participate in the AdSense program, which in turn boosts Google's own ability to sell search phrases for cash...

I personally believe that ask.com is the first search engine to specifically make boosted rankings for "encyclopedic" content a browser-based option. That's why I've switched to it, anyway... Meanwhile, Yahoo and MSN are presumably just using a simpler algorithm that doesn't reward "content instability" as much, if at all. They're probably not boosting WP's rank deliberately, either, of course.