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Like anything with SE all you can do is pick a philosophy (unless you're an engineer at Google and design these things) and run with it...
When it comes to rating content I think inbound links are counted, obviously, but the content surrounding that link is placed into a context. While Google can't understand that a video is of a football game and rate/index it accordingly by opening it up and "watching it" (as far as I know!), it can slurp up text and links which give it a context so that when someone looks up football videos on Google, the SE has already associated it with certain keywords.
It would also take into consideration numerous other variables we can only speculate on. There is this old debate, content vs. links. Four years ago I'm sure they were BOTH incredibly important but you had people arguing one or the other. And they are still important. But SE goes far beyond content and links. Even we are involved in influencing it now, the users, in various ways just by the way we use our computers.
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