skymanhonor - 7:05 am on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

"Remember that the site has essentially no traffic right now. I'd be surprised if it's getting 2-3 qps. Wait till tomorrow and see how well it does when the load is much higher. And even then I'll bet it doesn't see more than 20 qps. Yahoo gets hammered every day with incredible volume. Comparing techpreview to Yahoo is a bit premature."

I don't know the backend, but google gets way more traffic than yahoo for its search -and google is faster. So it would seem that traffic is not the factor that determines speed.