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Yahoo’s strange estimations

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Sometimes when you are surfing the web you just encounter something so strange that it makes you laugh. Today was one of those days. I regularly use Yahoo to search on the web and I’m expecting it to behave normally, but today I noticed something strange.

When you perform a search for games you get millions of results. (901 mil. to be exact) Now I’ve some time but that’s way to many. So I tried narrowing it down by looking for web games. So I refined my search to narrow down the amount of results. Which is also the normal behaviour of a search engine.

Here comes the fun part! My second search, which is supposed to contain less results, came back with 904 million matches. I now that search engines round up the numbers to save time, but 3 million more results that’s just ridiculous. Can someone explain to me how it is that a more precise search returns a more generic set!

I’m seriously considering to let Yahoo for what it is. An in accurate and imprecise search engines with semi decent results. Oh and just to make sure I checked multiple queries and found out it isn’t a fluke. I also checked the same searches in other search engines and they did narrow down the amount of results.

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