Jut a suspicion, but I think Google may also have made changes around the types of site it shows for ambiguous queries, such as known entity names. For famous people/places I see more authority sites such as newspapers.

The earlier Linkresearchtools.com article also mentioned a few very big news sites getting big boosts after Penguin 3, and I don't think this is due to other sites dropping out.  

Did they release something else?  Might be the piracy update, and that could correlate well to named entities, but I'm not sure.

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