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Well, it seems Altavista somehow has a PR of 9. The only other site with the PR of 9 on that page is Yahoo but Yahoo's page doesn't seem to mention "search engine" as explicitly as Altavista, so the ranking makes sense.

How in the world Altavista has a PR of 9 is a mystery though.

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"...the ranking makes sense." PR and rank are often correlated, but PR is not a good predictor of actual rank.

"How in the world Altavista has a PR of 9 is a mystery though." A large volume of natural links is probably the explanation here. altavista.com probably ended up in some trusted repository as well, which may render it relatively immune to "penalties" or other dampening factors.

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