Searching With Quotes On Google And Getting Diluted Results

[Boris_yo]

Here is what i mean:

Go to Google and search for "discontinued ceramic tile" with quotes.
You will get 2,990 results (as i'm writing this)

No go to the bottom and start navigating to further pages - 1,2,3...10...
Do so until you come to final page, now check the results on top - Results 171 - 173 of 173

How is that possible? I thought there is 2,990 results as Google was saying?!
Is this Google bug?

Are you still there? Now there is supposed to be the following message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 173 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Click on it, you will get on 1st search page and this time Google says that there are 3,020 Results. How is that makes sense? Is there 2,990 results or 3,020?!

Scroll to the bottom of the page and start navigating Google result pages again - 1,2,3...10
Do so until you come to final page, now check the results on top - Results 341 - 343 of 343
What?! Now there are 343 results and not 173?

Yes, only this time there is no that message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 173 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Confusing isn't it? And here are my questions:

1. Do i compete with 2,990 pages or 3,020 or 173 pages or 343 pages?
2. What are "omitted results" - are these pages that Google considers duplicate?
3. Does Google count these "ommited results" in results?

[ademmeda]

Hi,

Although I'm not an authority on this, I would like to share my insights about the "search".

In order to return the most relevant results to the user in such a short time, Google calculates an approximate number of the indexed pages that include the phrase "discontinued ceramic tile". So, nobody can tell you the exact number of pages at a certain time that include the given phrase. And believe me this is not that important. You have to focus on the first page of the results, since your aim should be to penetrate into the first ten listings. Though, the less the approximate number of the pages the better.

For the omitted results part, as you noticed, the omitted results are the ones from the same domains. And since they are on the same domain, Google returns the most relevant page from that domain and omits others.

Finally, you may want to hear what Google says about duplicate content.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content and multiple site issues