Yahoo discovered something similar in 1995. At the end of Yahoo search results they'd have links to do the same search at other search engines. People were surprised at their confidence at the time. But it wasn't just confidence: it made Yahoo the natural starting point.
AskJeeves used to provide users an option to search using AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and a host of other search engines. Consequently, AskJeeves always felt like the "natural starting point".
Similarly, Michael Arrington builds trust by often mentioning Om Malik (GigaOm) and Richard MacManus (Read/WriteWeb) on his blog. I suppose it leaves the feeling that "He can't possibly promote a rivals blog without having a better one himself!"
Ironically, a few weeks ago, Scoble mentioned that bloggers are geedy when it comes to linking (he mentioned Engadget/Gizmodo as an example, and that sure did piss them off). I think I will go ahead and forward this study to him :)
That said, I would be interested to know how they conducted this study. From the looks of it, it seems they simply compared a site's worth versus # of outgoing links. The fact that we agree with the study might just be a placebo affect.
This is interesting, I'd never heard about it. Time for some research, I suppose. Yahoo's gambit is reminiscent of a real-world retailer telling a customer to go to a competitor to find the product they really want (my local bike shop did that once, and won my lasting trust).
In the case of bloggers, though, there is another effect in play: blogs succeed basically on connectedness, so for a new or up-coming blog, the most important thing is tying into the network of existing blogs in the relevant ___domain. It makes sense that praising, referencing, critiquing, generally interacting with "competing" blogs is the best way to jack into the community.
