arronsky - 12:44 am on Jun 25, 2010 (gmt 0)

Tedster, my guess as a CS guy for this very odd behavior, in context of what they publicly have stated is their goal, is that they are running into data import problems and have to roll back certain crawl information to 'known-good' sets. This may be accidental, or it may be purposeful. If I was them, I'd use long tail and mid-tail to test the heck out of the system, while ensuring that head of tail results were as pristine as they could be, and flexed Caffeine's muscle. When I search for Obama, I expect crystal clear results that do all of what Caffeine promise. When I search for blue widget x in location y, my pain tolerance and expectations is much higher and lower, respectively, making it a great place to 'play' with real world data and loads.

Anyways, we're all guessing.