[thelist] Google results report way over the number of indexedresults

[Chris Hayes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "liorean" <liorean at gmail.com>

> I think if you really examined other search engines, you'd see about
> the same. They search the index, but they don't maintain a sorted list
> of more than the n most relevant hits for that search. In Google's
> case, n is 1000. In others, it may be a different value. But somewhere
> there is a limit, at least on any well performant search engine.

Thanks liorean, search engines are a mystery unto themselves to mere mortal 
like myself.

But it goes beyond this a bit.  I honestly do no not have 10,700 pages / 
documents to index, only 1810.

So is Google's "1-20 of about 10,700" a poorly calculated guess or a symptom 
of more serious issues it's having indexing the site?

I can't see how.  There are a couple of problems on the site it can come up 
against but to estimate 10,700 pages from less than 2000?

It looks like some kind of logarithmic (exponetial) error (ie an amplified 
inaccuracy)  but even if I understood the maths I couldn't explain it to the 
SEO or the client.

I might jump the Google forum but it's not usually very helpful.