Can you give a reasonable explanation for the top result for "finance"?

http://www.google.com/search?q=finance&btnG=Search

Goog Finance ahead of Yhoo Finance, which is much older/more popular? In all the other three major search engines, Yahoo is ahead of Google.

No idea Ionut but I noticed that ifg you type earth, images, labs, finance or groups into firefox address bar (which cross references with Google) you get the google products. I haven't tried any others.

My favorite query is: "more".
http://www.google.com/search?q=more

Just to dispel any rumor that they always stick their own services on top, searching for news brings up CNN above Google News. That said, it still seems like it might be artificially high in the rankings.

http://www.google.com/search?q=news

wasn't there a post guessing how long it would take GFinance to over take Y!Finance on that Query? I'm too tired to look for it :-)

Ionut, maybe it 's alpha order ... G proceeds Y :(-

That would also explain the CNN result! :)

With the exception of 'News', Google ranks their products above the competitions when you do a search for them.

I tried searching on 'images', 'maps', 'video', 'books', 'scholar' and 'desktop' , the number 1 spot for each search was of course the Google product/service.

I think the reason is that Google seem to count the freshness of links. there are so many fresh links to Google products from blogs, news articles, etc. Yahoo finance, and other older products from competitors have links, but perhaps not as many fresh links. On the other hand, google probably favor blogs – and lots of blogs links to google products.

You can also argue that most online places that links to Google products would most likely have webmasters/authors who are familiar with SEO strategies for Google, which would probably give their links a boost. Just a guess. I really doubt google is doing this manually.

OR – How often are blogs posting about Scholar or Booksearch though? Those don't seem like topics that are being written about often.