1. Is this meant to compete in some way with PodcastIndex.org or to complement it? PodcastIndex.org is part of the Podcasting 2.0 initiative. Also part of it, which would help a podcast search engine, are the extended podcast namespace tags which include the person tag (who all is on a given episode), transcript tag (a link to where a text transcript of the podcast is), and much, much more. I like the idea of the Podcast Search Engine but I don't know if it's leveraging all of the rich data that is available through PodcastIndex.org
2. I did a search on "Adam Curry" (aka "The Podfather" who, along with Dave Winer, invented podcasting) and the results are nowhere close to showing all of the podcast episodes in which Adam has appeared in the last few months.