Today when I was analyzing the site report from Google Analytics I saw that someone has used the keyword “adsense pay scales” on Google to reach my site. I have posted an article regarding adsense once before(click here to read it) but I have never searched for “adsense” or a keyword like that on Google to see whether there’s my blog. So I searched for “adsense pay scales” and it gave me a search result page with the phrase “Results 1-10 of about 662,000″.
Then I visited page by page looking for my blog but I couldn’t find it. But the most surprising thing happened to me was that there was only 818 results. Then what is 662,000? Still there’s the phrase “Results 811 - 818 of about 662,000″ but the 818th result is the last one.
At the end of the page there was a link to repeat the search with omitted results so first I thought the other results have been omitted. So, I did the search again and this time their number of results was 657,000. With the omitted results they have omitted about 5,000 results! What a surprise. Anyway here again I ended up with 1000 results but still with the phrase “Results 991 - 1000 of about 657,000″. This is getting more and more interesting!
So, I searched for few other keywords to see whether the same thing happens and yes it did. Always Google gives us a meaningless big number but the actual number of results are much more smaller. Then I tried the same thing with Yahoo and it also gave me the same result.
Please if you have encountered this before or if you know what’s going on leave a comment here. Your opinions are also welcome.
6 Comments to "False Numbers"
Please share your thoughts
Filed in: Internet
This is good experiment
I’ll think you find that that 600k+ is a count of how many indexed pages contained your search terms.
It only displays a certain amount, because the keywords appear in the other pages minimally (once).
So when ur searching for 3 words, that make sense together in the right context, google is betting that any webpages that feature just ONE of these keywords Just ONCE on the page, arent likely to be even closely relevant to what you’re lookin for.
Which would be correct, yes?
Still doesnt answer the question as to how someone found ur blog through that search term, though.
Ask Matt Cutts (www.mattcutts.com/blog)
It explains how I got 600k+ results when I first searched for that. But it doesn’t explain how the number of results decreased by 5,000 when I repeat for the omitted results.
Yeah, its normal and search results differ on various locations, so you might not have found your site on the first 818 listings.
Btw Matt Cutt has commented here, hmmm….. I doubt whether its the exact Google guy
Actually shanX there was only 818 results even the Google says there is about 662,000 results. That’s what I wanted to point out. Your explanation may be right for the question how someone found my blog through that search and why I couldn’t find.
Hmmm… yep, my explanantion was for that
And Matt’s explanantion was for your question, hah hah but i dint understand his explanation