martinibuster - 8:06 am on Oct 31, 2009 (gmt 0)

Good observations, onepointone. ;)

>>>Which one is more relevant and should rank higher?

All three search engines try to get over that hump by weeding out sites that they identify as sending negative signals and giving points to sites that contain positive signals. You can see this in action FOR SOME QUERIES on search.yahoo.com where for example some two word queries for B2B keywords may return irrelevant .gov and .org results despite the existence of other more relevant sites outside those TLDs.

For other two word queries, let's say for lifestyle related phrases, Yahoo may return a set of results with big brands and the occasional oddball small site. The big brands are trusted because they have so many positive backlinks; the small site may be trusted because it lacks many of the negative signals. It's not good, but it's not bad, know what I mean? Just my opinion, but this goes on at Google, but it's done better than on Yahoo and Bing.

eHow is not well known yet and I don't think they've developed a reputation in the mind of the general public yet. I think ultimately eHow is going to succeed or lose based on the quality of it's content.