Google: #2 http://www.google.com/search?q=Pediatric+Sports+Injuries

Yahoo: #1 http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGklD1pY5I0hcByd1XNyoA...

I didn't bother searching msn. I'm sure the results vary from query to query, as they do for all sites. The point is that many of these pages are ranking quite high on Yahoo as well. Either you can attribute that to Yahoo being in on Google's evil plan, or you can understand that these pages naturally rank quite high because they are linked to from the front page of a highly linked site that has been all over the news and blogs recently (Knol).

Unfortunately the truth is not as dramatic as these "Google is evil" stories, so people often prefer the later.

It still remains that pages on Knol are getting much higher rankings than the pages themselves warrant. I wondered why the front page of Knol had such a random collection of content links - it seemed very ungoogle - now it looks like SEO that's damaging the reputation of their search engine.

I think it had a random collection of links because Knol is tiny and that's all they have. I'm sure it will change as they grow.

It sounds innocent enough, but it does point to some problems with their search ranking. The quality of their search results has to be far more important than Knol.