mfagan - 1:00 am on Mar 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

it appears you can limit the search to 9 sites, although it bombs out with 10

Google isn't limiting the number of sites you can search, all queries are limited to ten words. So if you wanted to search for "foo bar" (two words), you could only limit it to eight sites.

a very simple technique for making some sort of meta-search

That's true, I do this frequently. I recally once upon a thread long ago that I mentioned it would be nice if Google could let me store a comma-deliminated list of domains to run selected queries against.