elguiri - 10:35 am on Apr 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

They certainly do have a spidering issue. And I imagine that comes down to money. They have nothing like the amount of cash Google and Yahoo have to invest in infrastructure.

Nonetheless, I see their ability to sort the data they have as stronger. Google bombs never worked in Ask because of the way they cluster results. They seem to me better at identifying authorities for a particular search term, and therefore can rely less on things like trustrank which is now twisting Google's results in another direction - sites with lots of .edu or .gov links will rank well for including a phrase even if the rest of the page has little relevance. (Sorry, I have no scientific evidence for this - it's just perception).

One other point. Google's spider speed is backing off too. The supplemental index, which will end up being 90% of documents, won't see too many bot visits.