Benchmarking Information Quality

Wikipedia ranks #2 for Aaron right now. They also rank for millions of other queries. They don't rank because their information is of great quality, they rank because everything else is so bad. About.com was once considered best of breed, but scaling content costs and profitability is hard. Google doesn't hate thin affiliate sites because they are bad. They only hate them because the same thing already exists elsewhere. Search engines try to benchmark information quality, and create a structure which encourages the creation and open sharing of higher quality content. When you see poor sites at the top of search results view it as a sign of opportunity. Realize that whatever ranks today is probably not what search engines want, but it is what is considered best giving the lack of structure to the web and how poor most websites are.