Well, I tried to reproduce your search and couldn't get exactly the
same result. However, I think I came close enough to be able to help
you understand what's happening and to give you some hints on what to
do about it.
First, if you do a search on "document scanning service":
://www.google.com/search?q=%22document+scanning+service%22
you get only "results 1-10 of about 231" results. Note that the
three-word string is entered with quotation marks around it. When you
are searching for a multi-word phrase, this is usually the best thing
to do.
Note that the 231 is an estimate supplied by Google without actually
completing the full search (which is not actually needed anyway unless
you are going to view ALL of the results). If you page through the
results (you may want to go to the Advanced Search page and increase
the number of results displayed per page to 100), you'll find you get
121 actual results. There is also a note at the end that says, "in
order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some
entries very similar to the 121 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results
included." If you click on the "repeat search" link and page through
the new set of results, you find 228 results, indicating that the 231
estimate was pretty close. (Note that if you try to duplicate my
numbers, you may not get exactly the same counts if Google's index has
been updated since my experiments.)
Incidentally, if you are really looking for a comprehensive list, you
should actually search for all likely variants. In this case, you
would at least want to search "document scanning service" OR "document
scanning services" which gives "about 885" results (393 without the
"very similar" results and 870 with).
If you leave out the quotation marks:
://www.google.com/search?q=document+scanning+service
then you do indeed get "about 314,000" results, most of which contain
the three words in non-consecutive locations in the document. When the
numbers are this big, the counts may be very approximate and tend to
be over-estimates. If you just page through the results, there are 860
if the "very similar" ones are left out. If you repeat with the
omitted results included, you can get another 140 results, though it
appears that Google search won't give you more than 1000 results. In
most cases, the "very similar" results are more pages from sites
already listed and do not represent additional useful pages to view.
In short, there is nothing being hidden from you in additional results
not displayed, and you do not have to pay for any additional
information. Rather, you just need to be aware that the results count
that appears on the first page displayed may be a crude estimated of
the total count; the actual count may be significantly smaller. |
