Google swears blind it doesn't give SEO advantage to new internet dot-words

If you can't take the word of a snake-oil salesman...

It's pretty dispiriting, actually. These keen young salesmen, understandably a little zealous in bringing these AMAZING MONEY-MAKING SECRETS TO YOU EXCLUSIVELY, work tirelessly in your interest to HELP YOU REALISE YOUR ASPIRATIONS and all you can do is sneer at the new domain market...

Just think: with just a little puffery from each of us we could soon build a huge bubble together, WORKING FROM HOME IN OUR SPARE TIME LIKE THIS WOMAN FROM RIMJOB, WISCONSIN WHO IS NOW DEBT-FREE

Pizza

If people are searching for, say, pizza and there is a website ending in .pizza, there is a much higher likelihood that you can find information about pizza there.

I just did a search on "pizza" and all the results on the first page were about pizza. Why would I expect otherwise?

"One third of the roughly 1,500 applications for new internet top-level domains were for brand names – including many of the world's biggest brand names: IBM, Heinz, Lego, Ferrari, Intel, and of course Google."

"and of course Google." belies the fact that Google bought .google with a rider that says it won't sell .google domain names to anyone.

Would surface.microsoft have and advantage over surface.microsoft.com or microsoft.com/surface?

I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no. Any of those sites, if they existed would be the official Microsoft site on the product, and therefore would have a strong case for being the no. 1 slot on the search results.

Best choice?

"So it makes sense for Google to know that if people are searching "Microsoft desk" that the domain ending in .microsoft is far more likely to be the best choice."

No, that doesn't make sense at all. If I'm searching for "Microsoft desk", I'm almost certainly either going to be looking for reviews or for somewhere to buy the product at a sensible price. An official Microsoft domain will never be useful for either of those. This is not a comment on MS, it applies to every company - buying direct from the official manufacturer's website is never going to get you the best deal, if it's even possible at all. And obviously you'd be insane to look for any sort of balanced reviews or comparisons to alternative products there. In fact, unless someone is specifically looking for technical support, most of the time it would be far more useful if Google actively excluded any official product sites.

Errr, a lot of the examples make sense and suggest no bias. If I search for a keyword that contains company and the word drink i would expect it to favor drink.company over drink.com because the actual domain name contains both of the words I typed. Much the same as I would expect drink.company.com to be found first over drink.com. This doesn't suggest a bias, I suggests they are treating the words entered against the words in a domain name with as much significance as they always have.

It's clear the search engine is using location to order search results, could this be circumnavigated by hosting a page of all post/zip codes?

Oh and it's not just using I.P. location, if you sign into chrome and use android with location turned on (I did this for a test) it actually used my mobile network signal to plot directions as it knows where I am (though not exactly of course but very close)

This means that .pizza is a worthless domain as it's always going to default to location.

I expect that will be the case.

.com will rank as highly as anything else. Until .search becomes the TLD for search engines like google, then I expect the story will change.

Conspiracy theory?

Don't believe Google – believe us!

the effect your domain name has on page rank is nearly inconsequential when compared to inbound links and content, so even if the new TLDs give a boost of one or two positions, it'll still be on page 26.

the first rule of SEO is there is no replacement for compelling content.

Company websites rarely have the info I want

Company websites rarely have the info I'm looking for on a product. They can be useful for confirming some info or getting a driver if they even bother to make their website useful in such a way, but far more useful are user forums, and posts by other users about the product. An example, Dell service manuals for your laptop. Dell for the most part makes modular laptops, easy to disassemble, replace parts either with OEM, or even standard parts not oem, and put together again. They write excellent service manuals on these with step by step diagrams and perfectly clear instructions and then won't share or sell them unless you're a Dell certified repair shop. Results from Scribbed or paste bin are much more useful than Dells website when I want to know how to replace a part. Of course the usual precautions apply when grabbing a PDF from the internet. A local virus scan followed up with a scan from virustotal is never a bad idea.

I'm sure Google knows this and I'd say I do seem to see it reflected in their search results. I would hate for a companies domain to always be the goto answer for a search as their motive is profit not truth. Another example, users have a problem with an Apple product. Apple says there are no problems with Apple products and deletes user forum posts on Apple domains. 18 months later users win a lawsuit against the company and Apple recalls all affected models. Apple is the last site I'd trust for info on the reality of their products.