Something at Google is bugging Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. Namely, why is it, when you try to specialize a search – namely, eliminate potential search results by typing “-keyword”, you frequently get a much larger list instead?
To prove his point, he conducts a simple search on “cars,” and elicits over 546 million results. However, when he performed a search for “cars –used,” which one would think should eliminate any website with the word “used” in it, the number increases to over 661 million.
This, Sullivan says, is a long-standing problem; a gripe he has had with Google for years. Sullivan provides an answer of sorts from Google’s Matt Cutts, who says that search results are simply “estimates,” and not an exact count of pages that meet the parameters of the search.
In regards to why “A B –C” can return more results that A B searches, Cutts says: “The query [A B -C] causes us to go deeper through our posting lists looking for matches, which can lead to more accurate (and larger) results estimates. Other things can cause us to go deeper in finding matches, such as clicking deeper in search results.”
Using the cars example and Cutts’s explanation, Sullivan says, when you delete a term from the search task, it allows the search engines to “think” harder. Consequently, it can pull up more results.
In addition, with more and more websites coming online daily, Sullivan says it’s not as easy as it once was for Google to catalogue all of the information available on the web. This, however, doesn’t excuse Google from aggravating behavior. He suggests that maybe Google should add a disclaimer next to the results count stating that what you’re seeing is indeed an estimate.
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