actually, all we know is that wikipedia is the first hit, which means a number of things, always changing, according to how google decides to rank the results. We can infer that a lot of people visit wikipedia, but what's more important to google is that it's popular because it's highly linked: It is highly ranked because people _link_ to the site -- as well as about 200 other factors in a complicated algorithm that they have to constantly tweak to keep ahead of the assholes trying to scam their system.
From there, its algorithms usually look at whether the sites linking to another site are sort of related. In other words, if I have a web site about feminism that is *for* feminism, a lot of links from splogs (spam blogs) and link farms won't count as much as a lot of links from other sites that are actually about feminism.
Google also looks at the text of the links going to the site. Does the text say "socialism"? or does it say "link" or "go here"? The one with more specific content, "socialism", will be more valuable than the ambiguous one that says "link" or "go here".
google's ranking algorithm also takes into account how well-trafficked a site is. If the site gets 50 hits a day, it's not going to rank as highly as a site that gets 5000, even if the bulk of the people visiting that highly trafficked site are there to learn more about teabagging. Althought they do look at that a big as well. (traffic data comes from a number of sources, including the google toolbar, which they use, like survey data, to help rank site popularity acc to traffic)
Also, google looks at how many times a search term appears on a site, where on the site those terms appear, etc. Socialism at the top of the page, in a heading tag for instance, is going to be recognized as more important that the word socialism buried in the text at the bottom of the page.
Finally, but only because I don't have space and time to look at all 200 factors, google also rewards sites that adhere to web standards: the use of link attributes such as title text; the use of semantic XHTML; the use of alt attributes on images; keywords, descriptions, and title metatags; etc.
those of you who have web sites can send cash payment for this very valuable advice to my paypal account. (JK JK)
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws