steveb - 2:13 am on Dec 16, 2002 (gmt 0)

"May have to do with the sorts of topics we search on."

Sure, but look at the other thread running now about FAST. A site gets a #1 ranking without *any* evidence of quality content -- no human directories, no "votes" via linking, and no hint at all of "quality votes" from links from other solid content sites on the same topic (aka, themes).

It's true that all these things can be manipulated, but just ignoring them and handing out a rank based only on words without content, that is just really bad.

Random results will lead to some searches being fine and some hideous and most somewhere in between. FAST does best, great even, for complicated multi-word searches and obscure searches because it has a large index. It does very poorly for one-word searches or common phrase searches because it has no way to sort the results content-relevantly.