Consider when searching "nissan" in Google, http://www.nissan.com/ is the fourth result despite being essentially a parked page that no one would ever really want when making that search.
No, www.nissan.com is popular because of Page Rank. It really is little (if anything) to do with the domain name.
The Page Rank is high with nissan.com due to its lawsuit with Nissan Motors. They even have a link at the top of their page with information about the lawsuit.
Many tech articles have been written about www.nissan.com. This is more a study about Page Rank, Public Relations and the Streisand Effect than anything.
Interesting domain! But can't they be removed from Google for selling backlinks [0]?
Their ad [1] says it explicitly: "webmasters rank better in Google with backlinks on Nissan.com". That seem to be against the webmaster guidelines, no?
Less a parked page than a flaming middle finger at nissan motor corp. No love lost. Read the dude's time line of judgements and court dates. Sort of interesting IMHO
It's easy enough to demonstrate that Google gives significant weight to domain names that match the search query. It's not entirely clear how that might be influenced by the TLD, though, whether they'd explicitly favor nissan.com over nissan.biz for example.
no, they don't (unless your site is hosted on a spammy pseudo TLD like co.cc), but in general google does not prefer one TLD over the other (they stated this a thousand time, you just have to trust them, if we annoy matt enough he will probalby even stated this here once again) - google does not prefer one TLD over the other - but people are.
people search for [nissan.com], so that domain has navigational search demand, which is very likely a factor for google.
I would say TLDs are very influential.