[bmac27]

Imagine a search engine that simply removed the top 1 million most popular web sites from its index. What would you discover?

A mix of affiliate-driven content sites, abandoned blogs & spam sites, based on some of the searches I did. The broader the category, the more likely I think you are to stumble on something relevant and helpful.

(Also, .gov sites don't seem to have been removed from the index. A search for "type 2 diabetes" still brings a number of results from NIH.gov, mimicking what Google serves up.)

[courtewing]

I believe "removes the top 1 million most popular websites" means that they nix search results from the million most trafficked domains on the web as a whole rather than simply the top million results for a specific search. I doubt there are very many .gov domains that fall into that group.

[bmac27]

NIH.gov is ranked #335 globally (185 in U.S.) according to Alexa.

[dave5104]

That was my initial thought on what you'd end up with. Aren't the top 1 million most popular sites popular for a reason? Of course there's some garbage in there... but what's the value in removing Wikipedia?