There is definitely a preference for .com. This is prob just bc .com is the most trusted and commonly used tld so it only makes sense that Google would give .com's a preference if they want to give the best user experience. In hte end though you can certainly outrank a .com if you have a .net you will just have to have a little bit more backlinks and a little better quality content.
comparing with .net I would rather prefer to have .com domain for better SEO, but it should be noted that domain extension has a small impact on search engine rankings! Content and back links are have higher value!
wasnt there something a while ago about .info name being devalued? because they were being sold for a dollar so an easy option for spam. I guess .net has been around a long time and seems to cost more than .com in many places.
From SEO perspective there is no difference between TLDs, but there are difference from the usage perspective and surfers are those who (mostly) prefer .coms
Major search engines never disclose their search ranking algorithms. Domain age is surely considered as the ranking factor but the domain extension has nothing to do with it so far. For e.g. two websites, .com and .net are based on same niche but .net has strong weightage for the keyword, then its for sure that .net will get more preference.
Of course, no one is saying that any of the search engine's are disclosing their algorithms. What we are all trying to do is make some educated guesses about some of the different parts of the algorithms (just like you are doing with domain age - which I definitely agree with you on). IMO it is pretty obvious that .com is favored over any other extension for a commercial site in the US - at least slightly. There are certainly some exceptions but just think of it like this: if we can agree that most people trust .com's and want to see .com sites then it only makes sense that Google will want to give the user the very best experience possible. Until people start to trust other tld's besides .com more than most of the time .com will be weighted more favorably in the different search engine algorithms than other tld's.
Actually the topic was "Purely from an SEO perspective do you think Google may have a slight preference for .COM domains?". So I do not think search engines will prefer a specific tld or cctld unless otherwise there is some specific reason.
Again IMO it seems to make sense that the reason Google would put a stronger weighting on the .com tld is because almost all users place a higher perceived value on the .com tld and Google understands this from tracking user behavior and in turn weights the .com higher than other tld's to give the best user experience. That is a good example of why I said in my earlier post
I have written several articles on the subject. It is my opinion that we live in a dot com world. By that I mean, almost any reference to the World Wide Web generally makes assumption to the .com TLD. Almost every advertisement on TV or other print medium is a .com website. I could count on one hand the times you have seen a .Net or other TLD. As far as the search engines go, I believe Google favors the dot com extension. I don't feel that Yahoo, MSN or the others do so as much. Any website, however, can attain a top ranking position if it is optimized better than its competitors.
i don't think there is a difference either. dot com domains, (I think) are much more popular and common to the average day person, and so "preference" may actually be the question here - which one would you and the public prefer? I think that if people were doing google searches that they would expect to see .com names.
Both are TLD's (top level domains) and i've seen no preference from google in my sites, generally, i'd just go for the .com from the way it sounds, it just appeals to me more, but it has little/no impact on SEO from my experience