Backlinks bloated in AltaVista?

First page states it found an exorbitant number of backlinks

[karakas]

Hi,

when I search my backlinks in AltaVista (or use tools that query various SE, including AV) with

link:www.mysite.de ,

I get a result that is simply too good to be true: thousands of backlinks:

AltaVista found 2,683 results

But when I click on the next result pages, say the 10th one, it displays a much lower number:

AltaVista found 59 results

which looks more plausible, since it lies in the order of magnitute of backlinks found by other SE, like Google, Alltheweb etc.

This makes comparisons based on backlinks with automatic tools that query many SE and *add* the numbers to a backlink "metric" totally useless.

Does anyone have an explanation?

[skipfactor]

Noticed the same thing yesterday. AV backlinks on one site went from 39 to an inaccurate 224 but only displays about 50 when checking by hand.

[claus]

I see the same thing with the following differences:

1) the total # of backlinks are much lower than on Google (*)
2) the relative difference is smaller between the page 1 number and the page 2 number.

And altavista also have the link:www bug (link:www.example.com yields different results than link:example.com)

/claus

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(*) as G does not display all backlinks, the AV results are far from exorbitant