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Search Engine Land » Channel » Commerce » Google Showing Fewer Than 10 Results For Some Searches?

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.

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