discuss Number of Google search results... is often times whatever!

[nomen]

Been meaning to share this for a long time... If you're like me, you probably often google stuff in quotation marks , e.g. "bright solutions", to see the number of search results for this and that phrase. Here's a thing:

That number is not reliable. Not at all.

I've got a habit of going through a lot of SERPs mainly to see how different companies etc. use a specific phrase in their marketing. Two things I've noticed:

- Even though the SERP 1 says, say, 16700 results, when you get to the SERP 3 that number suddenly changes to, say, 550. This happens very often. In fact, I've seen many, many times this number to change from hundreds of thousands to something like 120.

- The number of Google search results can change radically during one day. So one day it's 11000, and the next day it's 360000. Also this happens a lot.

No idea why this happens but I'd say it happens A LOT. Like 1 in every 4 times based on my experience which is endlessly Google queries a day.

Have you experienced the same? Am I missing something completely or what is going on here?

 

[biggie]

average monthly, is the standard to view

as one should expect or anticipate, that daily variances will occur


imo...

 

[nomen]

average monthly, is the standard to view

as one should expect or anticipate, that daily variances will occur


imo...

Sure, some variance is to be expected but that doesn't explain the phenomenon in question IMO. From hundreds of thousands to under thousand is not variance. Or is but...

Edit: At least it doesn't explain the first phenomenon.

 

[biggie]

Edit: At least it doesn't explain the first phenomenon.

what is first phenom?

 

[Asfas1000]

A similar thing happens when you search for a term like

"word1 word2"

and a lot of results refer to something you want to exclude, like an old movie title.

You then type

"word1 word2" -unwantedWord

and guess what : you get MORE results rather than less !!!

Has happened to me several times !

 

[Asfas1000]

One reason for this erratic behaviour could be that Google is now trying to guess the "user intent" and for this objective they may use stuff from your history etc , so it could be very unreliable.

 

[nomen]

what is first phenom?

"Even though the SERP 1 says, say, 16700 results, when you get to the SERP 3 that number suddenly changes to, say, 550. This happens very often. In fact, I've seen many, many times this number to change from hundreds of thousands to something like 120."

 

[nomen]

A similar thing happens when you search for a term like

"word1 word2"

and a lot of results refer to something you want to exclude, like an old movie title.

You then type

"word1 word2" -unwantedWord

and guess what : you get MORE results rather than less !!!

Has happened to me several times !

Experienced the same.