Editing Encyclopedia:Search engine test (section)

===Google distinct page count issues===
Note also, that the number of search string matches reported by search engines is only an estimate. For example, Google will only calculate the actual number of matches once the user navigates through all result pages, to the last one, and even then it places restrictions on the figure. At times, the "match" count estimate can be significantly different (by one or more [[order of magnitude|orders of magnitude]]) to the total count of results shown on the last results page.

A site-specific search may help determine if most of the matches are coming from the same web site; a single web site can account for hundreds of thousands of hits.

For search terms that return many results, Google uses a process that eliminates results which are "very similar" to other results listed, both by disregarding pages with substantially similar content and by limiting the number of pages that can be returned from any given domain. For example, a search on "Taco Bell" will give only a couple of pages from tacobell.com even though many in that domain will certainly match. Further, Google's list of distinct results is constructed by first selecting the top 1000 results and then eliminating duplicates without replacements. Hence the list of distinct results will always contain fewer than 1000 results regardless of how many webpages actually matched the search terms. For example, {{as of|2010|12|14|lc=y}}, from the about 742 million pages related to "Microsoft", Google was returning 572 "distinct" results.<ref>[http://www.google.com/search?q=Microsoft&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&start=600&sa=N Google search for "Microsoft"]</ref> Caution must be used in judging the relative importance of websites yielding well over 1000 search results.