For some searchers, Google seems to be forcing them into 20 or more search results on a page. By default, Google shows searchers 10 results on a page, but even if that searcher specified 10 on a page, some may be seeing twenty or more per page.
Andy Beard and myself are in that test or possibly a weird bug group. When we search, I am on Mac Chrome in the U.S. and Andy is on Firefox in the Poland, we are getting 20 or more results per search results page. Personally, I am getting about 30 results and Andy is getting 20 results per page.
Adding ‘&num=10′ to the end of the search URL and/or saving your search preferences to show 10 “number of results” makes no difference.
At first, I thought it might be a bug with Chrome on a Mac but then I heard from Andy that he was using Firefox. It may be a test or it may be a bug that is not browser specific. If I find out more from Google on if it is an “experiment” of theirs, I’ll let you know. For now, I hope that Google overriding a specific search setting is a bug and not an experiment.
Postscript: You can read our live blogging or learn how to watch the Google search event live at 9:30 PST by going here.
Related Topics: Google: Search Customization | Google: Web Search
It’s not an \override of a setting\ when that setting is temporary not available, as you found out when you typed in the URL argument.
The same thing happened for me, showing around 30 results. At first I thought it was just FireFox since other browsers worked fine, I removed app’s, reinstalled firefox, none of that worked. I finally got it back to normal to show only 10 results again by clearing the cookies and cache completely.