That's not a fair comparison since the "dot com" has been out there for much longer than the other names.

If something is unique, it has value.

Period.

Also some may use the new TLDs simply because they fit, rather than concern about being at the top of Google's search.

I used docsavage.info because that what my site gives. I'm not selling anything and I'm not a not-for-profit. The old TLDs didn't fit.

The people who know of Doc Savage find it without a problem through links from other sites. With Google there is the thought that if you aren't at the top of the search your site isn't popular and in many cases that simply isn't true. Many links to your page is not always equal to popularity. Googlebombing is proof how the system can be manipulated.

People have gotta stop using Google as the single authoritative source of information. I'm not saying the conclusions are wrong, but if you're doing serious research, it'd be a good idea to find out how Google's duplicate page elimination algorithm works.

Explanation: obviously, Google has to have some way to eliminate pages which appear under multiple URLs. You don't want to return both www.yahoo.com and yahoo.com as results to a query; that's not what your customers want. So you need a way to eliminate duplicates.

There are a lot of ways to do this. What if, hypothetically, Google keeps the first encountered URL for a given page? This would tend to eliminate URLs using the new domains. I don't know how Google does it, but the possibility exists and should be checked.

Google is a map (not the map) of the Web. When researching, it's critical to remember that the map is not necessarily accurate.