Thursday, September 18, 2008

MSN Live Search: Same query different number of results

May be what I have happened to chance upon at MSN Live Search (search.live.com), is a characteristic of other search engines like yahoo, google as well. Any expert out there, who can explain the whys of this seemingly discrepancy (feature)?

I tried 3 expressions of same example query in succession at search.live.com and got 3 different number of search results.

1. (site:.ke OR site:.tn) AND mogadishu
resulted in a page mentioning "Web 1-10 of 497 results"·

2. mogadishu AND (site:.ke OR site:.tn)
resulted in a page mentioning "Web 1-10 of 777 results".

3. (mogadishu AND site:.ke) OR (mogadishu AND site:.tn)
resulted in a page mentioning "Web 1-10 of 610 results".

In this example, number differences are not that great, but I had noticed a significant difference in these numbers, with a different search initially.

What are your expectations as a user in above example?

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