Given below are some google searches and results. What's interesting about these results are that, whenever you do a search in google, say for example "yahoo" at the top right hand corner of your screen, google tells you how many hits it gets. However, if you repeat the same query, say in another 2 minutes, it is likely that you would find that the number of hits returned is not the same. Initially we thought maybe the number of results changes because more pages are added to the google database or removed... but, this did not seem like what was really happening because, the number of results some time varied by almost 25 million webpages. Which is almost impossible to add this many pages or remove them in a span of say 45 seconds. Given below is some correspondence i had with the Google API Team: ======================================================================= Original Message Follows: ------------------------ From: Pratheepan Raveendranathan Subject: Question Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 00:54:10 -0500 (CDT) Hi, I was wondering if you can answer this question for me. I want to get the count of the "actual" number of results for a specific query. for example, if i search for "yahoo", i think google return 215,000,000 results. However, if i use the estimateiscount in GoogleAPI, i get the result as 128,000,000 which is a significantly smaller number of results. Is there a fix for this? Or another way to get the count? Pratheep. Reply: Hi Pratheep, Thank you for your note and for your interest in the Google Web APIs. As you may know, the number of results displayed when you search on Google is only an estimate, not an exact count. This means that if you perform two searches on Google, whether or not you're using the APIs to send the query, you may see two different numbers. In addition, results in our index change regularly. These changes are based on updates to our index, including the addition of new sites and the removal of outdated links, plus a variety of ongoing, automated processes aimed at improving the quality and content of our search results. This means that you may not always see exactly the same results when you query Google by using the Web APIs as when you type a query into the search box on www.google.com . Any discrepancies you may notice are likely the result of changes to our index and/or variations in the quantity of results estimated. Regards, The Google Team ============================================================================ Some sample queries: Day 1 ======= Duluth AND Vacation - 166,000. - 1.26am - 0.25 Secs 166,000. - 1.27am - 0.08 Secs 166,000. - 1.29am - 0.10 Secs 166,000. - 1.34am - 0.10 Secs 178,000 - 2.12am 178,000. - 2.17am Yahoo - 66,800,000 - 1.36am 66,800,000 66,900,000 - 2.07 74,300,000 - 2.10am 74,500,000 - 2.10am 74,300,000 - 2.11am 74,500,000 - 2.11am Around the same time, when i used my Google API program to get me the nunmber of results this is what i found: Each query was done at 5 minute intervals, and so for abt 30 mins. And bizarely enough the number of results were the same each time! Even more oddly enough the search was repeated on another day, and the results were still the same. Day 1 =============================================== Please Enter First Search Item yahoo Query 0 Completed @ 0.099472 Seconds Number of Results yahoo is 25700000 Query 1 Completed @ 0.07019 Seconds Number of Results yahoo is 25700000 Query 2 Completed @ 0.080287 Seconds Number of Results yahoo is 25700000 Query 3 Completed @ 0.060428 Seconds Number of Results yahoo is 25700000 Query 4 Completed @ 0.074885 Seconds Number of Results yahoo is 25700000 Query 5 Completed @ 0.103784 Seconds Number of Results yahoo is 25700000 Query 6 Completed @ 0.080879 Seconds Number of Results yahoo is 25700000 Odd Things: About a week and half ago when i was working on these queries, i found that the difference was huge for certain query's and in a matter of say 45 - 60 secons (Using the google form). This week however, the change is not that frequent or that big! Even more weird is that when i searched for yahoo just before i had email the API team i was getting around 215,000,000 hits. Today i am getting 66,800,000 which is less than 1/3 the results i got two weeks ago! Very very interesting and intriguing. I would love to know how they are doing this estimation! ============================================================== I had done some other searches. Say for example "Toyota" AND "Camry Solara" (camry solara is a type of toyota) and "Honda" AND "camry Solara". I was expecting the results for the first query to be much higher than the second one, because of the reason given above. However, this was not the case. this is because, most car dealers, list the toyota's and honda's together. these are some of the little problems which we have to look into. Take for example the query "Duluth AND Vacation" in comparision to "Hawaii AND Vacation". The searches in altavista returned less number of results for each query. Google on the other hand returned a much larger number of results. However, this is where taking the ratio comes as a plus.