I think that there are many reasons to be skeptical about it. They have a huge amount of data (assume they do have a massive index) and the same method of providing results. If anything the results run the risk of being worse.

There have been tests done by Google and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications which seem to show that the index is not that big at all.

Large indexes go stale pretty quick. Have a look at the crawls on your site maybe, are they harder and faster?

I wrote a lot more on this at your trusty Search Science blog .

Hope you find it interesting. Let’s see what happens to this scenario.
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#20
Old 08-16-2005
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dannysullivan
Surely yes, a shoot out and regulary relevancy reporting according to an agreed industry standard would be much better. Size is just the same old thing, a figure used as a surrogate for relevancy but which doesn’t mean the same thing at all.
I fully agree with Danny. There should be an independent 3rd party routine testing of relevancy on a semi-annual or quarterly basis. Perhaps the IAB or the W3C? This would really help the public understand which search engine is “bigger and/or better”.

I recall when MSN dropped Looksmart from their syndication earlier than anticipated after being given a walk-through of the results which turned out to be completely off-topic.