After the Chrome fiasco I've been looking a little closer at how google 'does' business.
A quick search for the terms 'google spyware privacy'. The results:

Yahoo: 48,500,000 for 'google spyware privacy'

MSN: 14,800,000 for 'google spyware privacy'

Google: 409,000 for 'google spyware privacy'.

It looks like Yahoo's search engine is far superior for this particular query with over 100 times the results of google on the google spyware search. Even MSN scored 28 times the google score. Funny about that.

There are two possible conclusions that spring to mind:

1. google may be censoring search results – should they rename it goggle?.

2. google search is inferior to Yahoo and MSN.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

And for all of you who don't care that your experience is being manipulated, by all means go like lambs to the slaughter, but don't force the rest of us to do it too.

Freedom of thought, speech and expression is at stake here. It's more than just the future of google.

3. They crawl different sites, and rank them differently

Your method doesn't make sense: many results aren't necessary if few results are relevant enough.

Query [microsoft spyware privacy]
Google: 5,840,000 results
Microsoft; 24,100,000 results
Yahoo: 69,500,000 results

Query: [yahoo spyware privacy]
Google: 320,000 results
Microsoft: 7,730,000 results
Yahoo: 34,200,000 results

Hopefully, Google's quality prevails over privacy concerns dispelling.

Thank you for the example Jerome. So we are to assume that fewer results means better 'quality' results?
Who is the judge – the algorithm?

Another interpretation might be that the fewer google results across the board suggest that Microsoft or Yahoo provide more information in order for the search user to make their own more informed decision.

Yet another could be that google already know a lot about spyware and want to save the searcher the trouble.

And another is that google may wish the subject to come up less.

In the absence any definitive explanation I fear that simply trusting that google presents better quality results may not satisfy wise men.

It's all a matter of interpretation and for some blind faith.

I personally started using google because it did at one stage provide more results. Perhaps I began using it for the wrong reason or google's ability to produce large numbers of high quality results has diminished.

If I follow the 'less is more' reasoning then perhaps CUIL would be Jerome's recommendation?

Human nature, as I observe, will generally go for quantity rather than 'alleged' quality. Quality is a niche market, not where I would have thought google sees itself, and those results you presented all point to more quantity from the opposition.

The revolution is search engine technology Google brought was never about more results. It was always about more targeted results. Nobody will look through every single results when they are presented couple of millions of them. So the key is how they are sorted, and that's what PageRank is all about, and that is also why Google become so successful, so quickly.

And BTW, fewer results may as well mean Google is more successful in keeping spam and duplicate entries out (the same article can be available under hundred different URLs on a single site, and it is sometimes hard for search engine to detect that... we know Google is working very hard to achieve this).

I have found that the same article is often available from many different sources and that the unwary surfer can usually find a copy for sale which is well up in the rankings and a little further into the results the same article may often be found in it's original form for free.

I wouldn't like to see a situation where the only results we find in the search engines were those 'quality' results which offered what is otherwise free, for payment, relying on the search engine to keep the 'free' copies out of the results because the advertisers are paying google to not show them.

As an advertising driven search advert delivery system google is under some (financial) pressure to not provide objective search results.

Is this what they mean by 'quality' results?

We will be having a more scientific look at this alleged 'quality' in the coming weeks and will provide the results here.

In the meantime could google perhaps use it's claimed expertise to detect those dubious parked click fraud domains they're so fond of delivering searchers to when they mis-spell an address in the search bar? Simply delivering you to a parked ad site isn't their best effort, couldn't they just provide a page of likely links, preferably without the parked domains?

That shouldn't be too hard now should it?

One other thing. Does google count genuine addresses typed into their browser location bar as 'searches'. Clearly the majority are not. We have all probably experienced using someones pc who has their browser setting 'search from the location bar' and found that even though they typed the correct name for a website, the search engine 'failed' to find it, and tried to direct you to one of the search engines partner sites.

I know this provides some lovely saleable data for the search engine, but I hardly think typing a known url into the search bar qualifies as a 'search', it's actually a DNS lookup, but I bet it helps pad out those search 'statistics'.

[happiness]
Yahoo: 223 000 000 = Good
Google: 94 400 000 = Evil

[carrot]
Yahoo: 68 900 000 = Delicious
Google: 27 200 000 = Beurk!