Live Search site: query bug

by morgret on January 7, 2007

Does Live know how to count pages? For the past several weeks, I’ve been getting some funny results when I do a site:domainname query on Live Search. I consistently have sites initially reported with two-three times the actual number of pages in the index. The way I have found to find the correct number of sites is to scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on the last page listed (of the 1 2 3 4 5 > navigation at the bottom). Then Live will return the correct number of results from the site:domainname query.

Here are some of the inflations I’ve seen:

Site A first report: 119 pages
Site A revised report: 44 pages

Site B first report: 67 pages
Site B revised report: 14 pages

Site C first report: 76 pages
Site C revised report: 19 pages

This only seems to happen if you are showing fewer results per page than the number of pages in the site command. For Site B, when I changed the default number of results to 30 instead of 10, the correct result of 14 pages was returned on the first search.

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