Will a .us domain get poor ranking in search engines?

I saw a post about that some time ago in a webmaster forum. Since I myself own a couple of .us domains and I also got a lot of other country code domain names I started doing some research on this subject.

Field study 1: I started my research by visiting one of the biggest .us sites, del.icio.us, and selected the first two keywords I could find on their site: social bookmarking. I then pointed by browser to Google and entered "social bookmarking" (without the "") in the search field. As number two in the search result I found del.icio.us, so I guess that's acceptable.

Field study 2: I visited another big .us web site, mon.itor.us, and did the same thing as with del.icio.us but using the keywords "free websites performance". The results where almost as good as in the case of del.icio.us because I found mon.itor.us as number three in the search results. I did another search, but this time for just "websites performance" and mon.itor.us was found as number four in the results.

These two field studies show us that it's possible to build a successful and high ranking website using a .us domain name . It shouldn't be any different if you use a .uk, .se, .dk, .eu or whatever top level domain for your site.

If you got more examples of successful and high ranking .us websites, please feel free to let me know

/Andreas