I performed the analysis comparing the performance of various search engines on the corpus of past Jeopardy! questions, which is featured in the middle of this

I performed the analysis comparing the performance of various search engines on the corpus of past Jeopardy! questions, which is featured in the middle of this blog post -- there is a supplementary Mathematica notebook for those who want to know more. There's also a nice word cloud of Jeopardy answer types up at http://selfishmeme.posterous.com/comparing-search-engine-performance-on-jeopar http://selfishmeme.posterous.com/comparing-search-engine-per... I thought this might be of interest to the H/N crowd, especially with all the recent chatter of Google's diminishing search quality. This approach has the advantage that it is a very wide and deep sampling of the world of possible factual questions, and a reasonably objective measure of the ability of search engines to strip out fluffy natural language to get at the heart of a search and present possible answers on the first page of results. Note the prominence of Yandex, the relatively unknown and recent Russian entrant to the English search market.