If you have questions about search engines you will likely find the answers at the Internet Search Engines FAQ, which is the Frequently Asked Questions website for the alt.internet.search-engines usenet group. These guys have been working with search engines since the inception of the internet, and have a very broad and deep knowledge pool for you to draw from.
The site is also the home of the Search Engine Reverse Engineering Project, a project to find the factors involved with web design and optimization (on and off page) that influence SERPs. Some of the tests carried out by this project include title tag attribute influence on results and search engines treating dashes as spaces.
