It is well-known that Google search results are warped in a number of curious ways, often fanning more chaff than wheat to pride of place in the pile of webpages whose job it should be to sift.

Short of analyzing the ranking algorithm itself one can only speculate on the underlying causes of these anomalous biases, but some reasonable guesses can be made on the basis of empirical observation.

I will start with a collection of concrete examples that we have been tracking in a cursory way on the Knol Edge Is Power : Google Test Topics thread.

I have to collect some data, but may wait until our Moderators decide to do something about the SPAM SWARM currently coming out of Wikiputia, if they ever do.

Jon