Idiosyncratic search

Over at A VC, Fred Wilson comments that

I have tried to use Yahoo!'s search as much or more than Google's over the past year as I want to support Yahoo! as much as possible. But I do not get the results I want from Yahoo!, particularly on advanced searches or complex search queries

And my comment: I find this too. But I'm never sure about the conclusion that this means Google has the better search engine. If, for example, Google merely had the search engine that I was more used to, that would look like the same thing to me. Or in other words, what if Yahoo! had a better search engine but I had trained myself over many years to search in a Google way rather than a Yahoo! way? That would look to me like Google had better search. Since most people use Google it would look to most people like that. Not wanting to sound conspiracy theory about it, but if that's the case then Google's dominant customer-retention strategy would be to make its engine more idiosyncratic rather than "better". And Yahoo!'s would be to make its search behave as much like Google's as possible.