Okay, I don't understand what the table tag is for.
Adding some color will help clarify things. The table itself is a link to www.altavista.com. The table contains links to www.google.com and www.dogpile.com. When a link is contained within a link, there don't seem to be consistently-implemented rules about whether the second link should override the first. I don't know whether the HTML specifications explicitly say, but my guess is that the second link should apply. What happens, though, is that some pieces of code to "find" whether there's a link at a given screen position stop as soon as they find one, while others each until they find the most deeply nested.
By the way, on Firefox, the "normal" text in the table appears as black with a link-colored underline except for the word "table" for which I requested [font color=red] (it appears as red text which with a red underline) and the word "these" for which I requested underlining (it appears as black with black underline).