I have a rather unique name and I googled it one day and had four or five listings. I don’t know why I googled it, maybe its like when my father used to check the obituaries regularly. “Just wanted to make sure I’m not in there,” he would say.
Anyway about a month ago, my count started going up and as of Wednesday I had 58 listings but they only displayed about 15 or 16 of them on two pages. Today I am down to 46 but now they are showing 23 on three pages.
Seems weird - why the weird number differences?
Most of the stuff goes back years and some actually go back decades.
Google’s searching and rating algorithm is a secret. So the following is based on how I would do things.
There are a lot more pages to search than a search engine can possibly index plus old pages are disappearing all the time and you have to check up on those too. So you have to allocate limited resources to doing both.
If a search term is used a few times, pages that list those terms should have their links checked (which in turn might also contain the search term). Previously indexed pages need to be checked to make sure that they are still online.
So you might be seeing:
Your hits increase due to added indexing caused by previous searches.
Your hits then decrease due to previously indexed pages have been “found missing”.
There’s also a lot of other issues dealing with distributed file processing, multiple servers and such that can make results vary even within a few minutes.