SF-Fandom Online Magazine Search bug

[Dovid]

I searched for "silvery hair", and received 81,000,000 results. Then when I clicked at the bottom on page "2", there were 735, then 22, then again 79,000,000, depending on which page number I click. Obviously there is still something that needs to be de-bugged.

[BoardAdmin]

That's actually normal behavior for Google. Their estimates of the number of pages relevant to a query are inaccurate even on Google.com.

[Michael]

I personally discussed this issue (bogus relevant page/hit counts for Google search results) with Matt Cutts (the head of Google's Webspam team) a couple of years ago. Basically he said there is no way they provide an accurate estimate of the number of pages that a query is relevant to. Some leading voices in the search marketing industry, including Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, have asked Google to get rid of the bogus page counts but for some reason Google has left them in the interface. I suppose the numbers serve some sort of purpose but I have no idea of what.