Add an extra search term - get MORE results?

[tedster]

I was just using Google to search for some information on WebmasterWorld and noticed something I thought was odd.

My first search was site:www.webmasterworld.com table cell height and it gave 406 results.

I added 'forum21' to confine the search results to the html forum, so now the search was site:www.webmasterworld.com forum21 table cell height -- and Google returned 512 results.

Now why would that be the case -- ever? Is this a window into an odd factor or approach that Google is now using?

[jimbeetle]

Well, I can't confirm what I'm thinking because of Google's current "sorry you might have a virus" bug when you try to go pass page 11 in the results.

But, adding the forum21 term can pick up extra pages because of the way it handles AND and OR operators. When it gets down to the bottom of the results it might pick up a few extra pages that contain something like "Bob Flisk Moderator Forum21" or "see the post in forum21" without the other terms.

This search will constrain the results to forum21:

site:www.webmasterworld.com/forum21 table cell height

[tedster]

Right you are -- I wasn't thinking clearly.

[Torge_Sturm]

tedster - funny that you mention this today.

For month I observed that querying our site in google returned less results for the query

site:foobar.de

than for

site:foobar.de 1

or for

site:foobar.de a

I explained this circumstance by the excessive use of redirects we are making. We have a lot of pages redirected to new locations.

I had the strong feeling google is/was counting them twice. One for the source and one for the target of the redirect.

Anyways!

The funny thing is, that exactly today I read your posting AND see the new index (periodically live in germany) returning less results for the extended queries (site:foobar.de 1).

To me it seems like google improved in the way they handle redirects or counting redirected pages.

[g1smd]

>> site:www.webmasterworld.com/forum21 table cell height <<

Fo a site with obvious dynamic URLs, rather than a folder stucture, this is even more generic:

site:webmasterworld.com inurl:forum21 table cell height