This Mahalo page was written by a sloppy computer program and is a shotgun blast of random gronk schlorped on a page in the hopes of making it appear to answer a question that nobody, even at Mahalo, really thought about:
If Google is bonusing up the owner of the former page to the detriment of the owner of the latter page, they're doing the Internet a favor. My only knock on them is that their response to the latter page didn't involve blowtorches.
Jason is right, your oddly skewed example isn't a counter to jason's point. Google doesn't rank based on quality, but a proxy that is gamable and is heavily gamed. I'm skeptical that they can ever effectively solve this problem.
ehow is an 11 year old domain name and they create millions of pages. They will out rank anyone due to:
a) domain age b) flooding the index with dozens of pages around a niche topic (as opposed to one good one).
google does NOT rank for quality... it ranks for signs of quality such as domain age, inbound links, etc.
until google can tell that there 100+ spam articles on a niche topic are not as good as on lifehacker or Mahalo or /. page we're screwed.
I mean, in order to win you need to buy and old domain and flood the index. what if everyone does this?!?!