NCSA edges away from Google-Yahoo! study | The Register

NCSA edges away from Google-Yahoo! study | The Register: "A widely discredited report that cast doubt on claims made for Yahoo!'s search engine is in even more trouble. The study appears to have been disowned by the university that published it, although a history professor originally credited as a co-author is continuing to host the material.

After Yahoo! boasted that it now used a much larger search index than Google, two students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois conducted a study that suggested otherwise. Matthew Cheney and Mike Perry concluded that only in 3 per cent of test cases did Yahoo! return more results.

However the students' methodology came under attack almost immediately. Researchers including Seth Finkelstein and Jean Veronais drew some quite different conclusions. The NCSA researchers had used pairs of words at random picked from a word list, which skewed the results towards web pages consisting of word lists. In other words, Google was simply returning more junk than Yahoo!"