Yahoogle twice the size of Google

For this query

[glengara]

I sort of took my eye of Yahoo! a while ago, and was surprised to see that for the search term "[searchterm]", Yahoogle seems to have twice the results of Google.

With Yahoos' propensity to drop secondary listings, I would have expected fewer results than from G.
So where are these extra results coming from?

[edited by: heini at 7:50 pm (utc) on Sep. 10, 2002]
[edit reason] industry related search term snipped [/edit]

[mahlon]

I just did search for our store name and Google found 65,100 and Yahoogle came up with 112,000.

[glengara]

Could it be the "alternative " database?

[bird]

What indication do we have that either set of numbers is actually accurate?

[glengara]

None.

[Marcia]

The numbers are considerably more, but the top ten is identical for the searches I just checked. One is 1,790,00 at yahoogle and 1,070,000 at google.

Like bird, I'm inclined to think it could be a calculation inaccuracy.

[chris_f]

This is probably to do with duplicate urls. I have noticed in the past that Google is good at filtering duplicate urls and not including them in the total count. However, I have come across several examples of Yahoo show the same URL in different places of the SERP's and as such counting the page twice.

Also, Yahoo adds it's own directory to the SERP's. Google of course doesn't include Yahoo's directory.

Chris.

[glengara]

Strangely, I've noticed recently that G tends to have far more duplicates.
That was a "regional" query, for which there are 4 results in the Y directory.
The numbers were something like G 4400, and Y 11080.

[glengara]

Tried a couple more searches, "furniture Ireland" came back with G 344,000 and Y 615,000.
"Art college Ireland" was G 395,000 while Y 682,000.
So wherever the numbers are coming from, they appear consistently higher in Yahoogle.