Google Forcing Some Searchers Into 20 Search Results

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.

Google Number of Results

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: Channel: SEO | Google: Search Customization | Google: Web Search


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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  • David_lou

    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.

  • http://www.elief.com Richard R.

    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.

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