Google's next search engine: What's the difference?

After our initial tests of Google's experimental Caffeine search engine versus its existing stable one, we're still in something of a fog as to what the differences mean. So for our third heat, we decided to implement a purposefully botched query:

Joshua Schachter, the founder of social bookmarking site Delicious who sold that site to Yahoo a few years ago, is in the news today for a remark he made on a public forum about regretting that move. His name is a difficult one for some Americans to remember, let alone spell, so we're going to implement a query that confuses the poor fellow with IndyCar driver Tomas Scheckter. And just to show how stupid we can act when we're getting paid to, we'll misspell poor Scheckter's name while we're at it.

So our botched query is Thomas Schacter Delicious Yahoo, as might be written by someone wanting some information on whatever it was the guy who founded Delicious said about Yahoo. We expect a lot of misses with this one, but how soon will either engine pull up an entry that corrects our spelling?
Both Caffeine and the current Stable version of the Google engine offered to correct the spelling of the correct Mr. Schachter's last name, judging from its position next to Delicious. And both engines pulled up as their #1 entry a blog post by Thomas Hawk from a 2006 meeting of social network leaders that Schachter attended.

But the citation that Caffeine pulled up from that same #1 entry contained the full and correct spelling of "Joshua Schachter," which anyone botching his name should have right away. That's a plus for Caffeine. But the Stable release included as its #4 entry a directory listing for a psychologist whose name very nearly matched our botched spelling -- more so than for Mr. Schachter or Mr. Scheckter. In Caffeine, that entry was completely missing from its first 100 search results.

So from what we can surmise thus far, we believe Google is experimenting with improving search relevancy by demoting or throwing out entries that maybe don't apply to the context of the query. In the good Dr. Schachter's case, yes, his entry should perhaps be thrown out because it really had no bearing to Delicious or Yahoo, even though his name was close to our misspelling. But Caffeine's terrific demotion of Rep. Carnahan's town hall meeting when it clearly did fit the context of our query, seems unreasonable by comparison.

As Google software engineer Sitaram Iyer blogged yesterday, "Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system." That feedback, Iyer said, may be delivered by clicking on the Dissatisfied? Help us improve link on the bottom of the company's sandbox page, although in some circumstances, arguably, testers may not be dissatisfied...though perhaps Dr. Schachter has cause for complaint.