7 Is The New Instead of 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain

Google’s Diminishing Search Result Returns

Google: Now With 3 Less Queries on ~18% of Searches

Today, I haphazardly checked the Google search result and I was completely shocked to see my search query. As Google now only displays seven search queries, which means that Google intends to give more tough time to SEOs. Later I read this new change in WebmasterWorld thread too.

I believe in future Google would display less or more search results, but never this consists. For example it happened before with bugs. But now, if anyone search for something and sitelinks show up, it seems like in every case, Google will shows a total of 7 results, as opposed to 10 results but when you switch next page then Google show ten search results. I am totally confused with this change and don’t know the purpose of it, what do you guys think? Leave us a comment.


Here’s a screen shot, for eBay:

Here is a screen shot of a search for [ted drewes]:

I read Danny’s post on Search Engine Land, he went a lot deeper in these changes - the question is, does this assists diversity? SEOmoz also did a deeper search at this so-called search shrinkage.

Google sent a comment to Search Engine Land that reads:

We're continuing to work out the best ways to show multiple results from a single site when it's clear users are interested in that site. Separately, we're also experimenting with varying the number of results per page, as we do periodically. Overall our goal is to provide the most relevant results for a given query as quickly as possible, whether it's a wide variety of sources or navigation deep into a particular source. There's always room for improvement, so we're going to keep working on getting the mix right.

Possibly that is why so many people saw position fluctuations around August 16th?

Yes, this seems to be mostly about navigational queries but is this improves for the searcher?