The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) found itself cleaning up after a pair of Illinois college students after they published (loudly) their dispute of how big Yahoo! total index was. It is unknown whether they were slapped or not.
After everybody, including (clears throat) yours truly, balked at the research methods employed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students Matthew Cheney and Mike Perry in a study done supposedly in conjunction with NCSA, the agency decided to have a closer look at things at well.
Today we find some crawfishing on NCSA’s part as the study has been conducted a second time with some modifications.
At the top of the modified study reads a new disclaimer:
“The following study was completed by two of Professor Vernon Burton’s students at the University of Illinois. It should be noted that this study was done outside the scope of any NCSA core projects. This version is a followup study to the original study that was done to address some legitimate concerns about the inclusion of “wordlists” and “dictionaries” in the study results. The followup study again sampled ~10,000 search queries of Google and Yahoo (excluding dictionaries and wordlists) and found similar results to the original study.”
The updated study still claimed that the results found Google’s index to be much bigger than Yahoo!’s, but not as much. The study, which no one will now refer to, states that Google returned 65% more results than Google.
According to French researcher Jean Veronis, who asked some intense questions of the original study, even Professor Burton’s name has been taken off the study, leaving the two students out to dry (or hang) for the mishap.
