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Google Showing Fewer Than 10 Results For Some Searches?

It appears Google is testing showing fewer than the typical 10 web search results, in what might either be a test or possibly a bug. I spotted complaints in a WebmasterWorld thread where searchers were asking why is Google limiting the results for a search query on Google UK for bbc football, such as shown: […]

Barry Schwartz on February 16, 2012 at 1:19 pm

It appears Google is testing showing fewer than the typical 10 web search results, in what might either be a test or possibly a bug.

I spotted complaints in a WebmasterWorld thread where searchers were asking why is Google limiting the results for a search query on Google UK for bbc football, such as shown:

As you can see from the screen shot above, Google is only listing one web search result, followed by a video result and then a news result – and they are all from BBC.co.uk.

We’d previously pointed out a reply in the thread that appeared to have been from Google’s Matt Cutts saying that this was a new feature, but on a second look, this is almost certainly someone faking responses from Cutts. We’re checking with Google about that, and whether this is a test.

Whether it’s an official test or bug remains to be confirmed. But it’s definitely something that can be replicated and for other searches, such as bbc cricket or bbc sport:

In the example above, for “bbc cricket,” only five web search results are shown, followed by a video result. But we haven’t been able to replicate this for other sites (such as itv football), so it might be a bug related just to the BBC site.

Microsoft Bing has done this with their form of Best Match when they first relaunched as Bing.

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.