Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Truth in Search Results

Every once in while I have an expereince which is compelling enough to write about. Just a moment ago I had one such expereince -- I was experimenting with with search of "link:url" with both Google and MSN Search and came across this weird observation: The first results page at MSN Search indicated more than 4000 backlinks for http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html, but on actaully following the Next button, could show only 129 entries. Google promised only 593 results and displayed 442 entries with a clarifying note that

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 442 already displayed.