977 = approx 51,000
Wow - that's a pretty crude approximation!
I have just (23:15 GMT) typed "brrreeeport" into Google and 977 is the actual number of pages (including similar pages) in the index, whereas 51,000 is the estimated number of pages.
Earlier today (18:53GMT)
977 = approx 23,100
The error has risen from over 2000% to over 5000% which is all spectacularly bad!
How do Google estimate their total number of pages on a search word? I guess it's a secret, but could it be based on some crude temporal extrapolation? Perhaps this has gone so wrong here because of the unusual speed in which the word is entering the pages of the internet? I'd like to assume that other searches are better estimated than this on Google - surely they must be, but I'm never really checked.
Yahoo and MSN seem much more accurate in estimating the total number of searches for this particular keyword.
It will be interesting to see how the quality of the search engine rankings pan out over the next few days. Drawing the line between spam and no spam will be virtully impossible - you could class it all as spam, or none of it, or something inbetween.
Also see: http://www.brrreeeport.co.uk
