Why so many results?

how come MSN is showing so many SERPs lately?

'surfing' shows 245,239,276
'san diego' shows 274,042,948
'msn emotions' 226,500,838

do these numbers seem ridiculously huge to anyone else?

I just did a search on msn for one of my kw that usually returns about 600,000 serps...
Today MSN has decided that, that keyword should return 203,869,062 serps .

339.78177 Times more serps then normal. Yeah, I'll take a guess and say something is going on .

ya, i noticed it last week... very strange.

Wierd, two of our keywords show up as 230 million and 270 million results. Far more than Google.

We appear number one for both though so I'm happy. Just a shame MSN doesn't bring anywhere near as much traffic as Google.

Maybe they're counting words instead of pages. Or some intern hit the wrong button - happens all the time.

Somehow they must think it looks good OR their total page count estimation algo is being redesigned. I'd go with the latter option.

Remember that count is always an estimate, and there's no place like the real world to test a new method We're talking MS here you know - LOL - king of service packs and hotfixes...

The MSN team mentioned to me that # of results was a big problem for their engine, but that since it's not something most users care about (even a little), they have it as more of a back-burner issue.

Incidentally, though, it forced me to exclude MSN search results from my C-Index calculation tool - too unreliable...

Hehe - cuts both ways... they got you to quit messing with their results - LOL

Now if we can come up with a universal "inflation factor" for MSN, all they need to do is divide by that....