Fake results in search engines

DomainEmpire.com · May 24, 2003

Why do searchengines give a fake number of results at the first search ?
For example, digiting "urbuz.com" in Yahoo, it gives "TOP 20 WEB RESULTS out of about 2,340" but, if you go ahead, you discover that real results are only 169 !

This's a serious problem that I'm noticing only now for the first time and the same thing happens when you test link popularity by domain-retriever (or by any other related software) ... results are never exactly as they seem to be ...

mole · May 24, 2003

urbuz.com

My humble advise is, always use Google for benchmarks. All the rest is suspect.

wyvern · May 24, 2003

Hi Luigi,

The results are not fake, just similiar to the results you see in the first couple of hundred. At the bottom of the last page of results, you will see the following:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 222 already displayed.
If you like, you can "repeat the search with the omitted results included" where the part in quotes is a link that you can click to see all the 2380 results.

In this case, looking through the results there seem to be hundreds that are links to certain Amazon.fr pages....maybe affiliate links that have been indexed or multiple pages that have a reference to the url (I didn't check them individually). For you to see all these would serve no purpose, therefore they don't show them in the initial search.

bidawinner · May 24, 2003

Actually I think the reason they dont serve up the other thosands of pages has more to do with the cost of serving up those pages...

besides , whats the point of serving up any pages after the first few anyways ? (from a webmasters point of view) we all know you dont get any traffic after that anyways.

DomainEmpire.com · May 24, 2003

All clear now, thanks anyone for your help and feedback.

radioz · May 25, 2003

If you want to get the number of entries for an EXACT term, use double parentesis(") for Google, at least. This will probably narrow the field some eliminating, say UrBuzz, etc.

Best Wishes,

Jon