internet_ventures - 11:26 am on Mar 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

I developed a web based statistics application some time back which utilised the start and num values in the query string of search engine referrals.

There are two things that this can be useful for:

1) A statistics package can utilise these variables to work out what search engine result page number a visitor found your site on. Which combined with the keyword they typed in can be very useful. This can never be 100% accurate due to some instances when these values are not set but in 90% of cases/users it is accurate.

2) You can manually modify these values to increase the number of search results you see. Which I am sure is what many rank checkers use and set the count to 100 instead of requesting 10 pages of 10 results and if they don't then that's what they should be doing. If I remember rightly some search engines let you increase the value to 300 results per page! (maybe msn cant remember though)