No outrage intended sorry if it came across that way.
I was commenting on the abrupt departure of searchyc not on the new search. Haven't seen the new search yet since it's not working on my blackberry for some reason. And I don't have my laptop with me.
Just off the top of my head here are some unanswered questions:
Why did Comcast shut them down? why did comcast have the authority to shut them down? Why didn't the searchyc admins take their site somewhere else? Why have they said nothing here on hn? Why were they shutdown mere days before pg announces an official search (hopefully just a coincidence). What happened to their data (it's especially valuable now that we can no longer see comment scores). Etc.
Griefing: If the system does not already, I think it should flag for review users who consistently downvote a particular user.
Cliques: Likewise if the same few people are consistently the first to upvote stories or comments of a particular user.
Multies/Sockpuppets: I think votes for a user buy another user from "too close" an ip address should be automatically discounted. I'm not sure how to define "too close" (and I suspect HN already does this)
Anonymous posting: I like the way MetaFilter handles anonymous posting instead of people making throwaway accounts. The downside of this is that 1) Posters have to really trust the site admins; 2) This becomes more work for the admins
Disallow noob posting articles: What % of the [DEAD] articles were posted by users with a very low karma? What % hit the front page?
(Yes, those last two are not directly related to the OP's comment but I feel they're ideas worth throwing out there)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621391